Futurists/Ray Kurzweil

[Metric]

The exponential graphs referred to are basically the rate of achieving big technological milestones vs. time. So you might think this depends a bit on what you select as the most important technological milestones to include in your graph -- but apparently Kurzweil has taken something like a dozen different lists (from different authors) of "most important technological milestones" and they all fit on the same (slightly fattened) exponential curve.

[Phil153]

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What type of thing would a computer have to be able to do for you to consider it some fundamental leap? And if some computer was able to do this, how likely do you think it would be that people would say what you just said about THAT accomplishment and move the bar further?

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A computer would have to be made of a material that can form a self organizing system, building up layers of meaningful abstraction from some input. At the moment computers are a bunch of switches that people can flick on and off. Nothing more. There is no inate capacity for intelligence or learning and there never can be with this structure. A capacity for learning needs to be tied to the material itself to become possible.

Building this material will likely prove to be as difficult as designing a bird's brain from carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and hydrogen. We are centuries away from the level of complex understanding required to build such a structure, let alone the engineering skills.

As soon a computer can satisfy the above, a singularity becomes theoretically possible. Though it may well be limited by other constraints.

[Metric]

I'm still not quite clear on why you believe this:

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At the moment computers are a bunch of switches that people can flick on and off. Nothing more. There is no inate capacity for intelligence or learning and there never can be with this structure. A capacity for learning needs to be tied to the material itself to become possible.

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If a "bunch of switches" computer can simulate and reproduce all the relevant functions of a single neuron, why shouldn't a sufficiently large computer be able to simulate all the emergent and hard to understand functions of a human brain? Is it your position that a single neuron does something inherently non-computable?

[John21]

Robot Discovers Itself, Adapts to Injury:
So Cornell researchers have built a robot that works out its own model of itself and can revise the model to adapt to injury. First, it teaches itself to walk. Then, when damaged, it teaches itself to limp.

Article

[vhawk01]

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Robot Discovers Itself, Adapts to Injury:
So Cornell researchers have built a robot that works out its own model of itself and can revise the model to adapt to injury. First, it teaches itself to walk. Then, when damaged, it teaches itself to limp.

Article

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Fascinating, thank you John.

[Rduke55]

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If a "bunch of switches" computer can simulate and reproduce all the relevant functions of a single neuron, why shouldn't a sufficiently large computer be able to simulate all the emergent and hard to understand functions of a human brain? Is it your position that a single neuron does something inherently non-computable?

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I think a the issue is that the people doing the models (or anyone really) don't really know all the details. The word "relevant" is the big problem here.
Neurons often process information in ways very different than computers (among other gigundous differences). I think it would make an interesting discussion on whether or not computers can simulate it closely enough for some of these problems but right now they can't IMO.
I think this also relates to vhawk's ealier processing power post in this thread.

[Rduke55]

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Speaking of which, I wonder if a lot of technology guys have this black box-type of thinking bias that extends to areas they know less about. It is tempting to infer things when you don't look inside the box...

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I think this is a very good statement.

[oneeye13]

if the predicted exponential growth in world population had kept its pace, there would be more people to read his nonsense

[Metric]

I'm not arguing that "all the details" or "every relevant function" is known. I'm merely arguing that whatever a neuron does, it ought to be simulatable on a computer composed of a "bunch of switches," assuming that nothing inherently non-computable is going on. Is this what you are objecting to?

[Rduke55]

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I'm not arguing that "all the details" or "every relevant function" is known. I'm merely arguing that whatever a neuron does, it ought to be simulatable on a computer composed of a "bunch of switches," assuming that nothing inherently non-computable is going on. Is this what you are objecting to?

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Yes, because people seem to think that because of the action potential's digital nature that that's its input and output. It's waaaaay more than that. Neuron-to-neuron communication has a lot of other stuff going on that can't be broken down to these switch analogies IMO.
You'd need a kind of analog computer maybe.