...comprehension of natural language, etc.

Then consider that computerized systems with such capabilities could have flawless recall of all they have ever learned, do complex mathematical calculations with ease, could be programmed to avoid mental pitfalls humans are prone to (like sensibly evaluating risks, grasping large numbers, avoiding logical fallacies), interface their minds directly into software analyses and simulations with all of the benefits of traditional non-AI programming, interface directly with enormous databases and search engines, etc.

That kind of a AI system would make your average human, and even human geniuses, comparatively sluggish and error-prone.

If I could let go of uncomfortable metaphysical qualms about the nature of self, I'd love to be able to download my human mind into that sort of AI system, then go on to grow into all the new capabilities I could be augmented with. That sort of thing would probably work a lot better than adding computer interfaces into my current fleshy human brain.

Researchers are having success reverse engineering the human brain. The problem is they will create a computer that acts like a human brain. No computer-like perfect memory. Just an ordinary human brain.

Some suggest they could make it superior by essentially speeding up the thought processes or find ways so that it wouldn't have to sleep but who knows if they could that. Speeding up the brain for certain things might be desirable but deleterious in other ways.

It might be easier and less dangerous to combine the advantages of computers and the superior reasoning abilities of humans by adding computerized libraries of knowledge and dictionary-like look-up capabilities to the computerized mind. However, the computer mind would have to want to use them.

Think about this way. Chess playing computers can play equally or better than human grandmasters under normal time-limit tournament conditions. However, if you give humans more time to move, humans can still defeat computers. Also, chess computers are programmed to avoid certain positions where humans can still easily defeat them.

Advanced chess is a special kind of chess tournament where very strong chess players play with access to very strong computers. The human computer combo is killer. The combination always wins the advanced chess tournaments which allow solo humans and solo machines to play but the solo entries never win.

They are developing things along the line of scanning human brains into computers so you really do start with a computerized-clone of a human brain. It could be a fetal brain but then just like a human it could take many years to develop or it could be a clone of an adult mind. Yeah, Frankenstein does come to mind. Imagine if the first mind they cloned was a politician or a CEO. We'd all be doomed for sure.

...with all of its flaws as well as its powerful abilities, and this emulation lives in the realm of digital hardware and software, it will then be much easier to analyze, modify and adjust the resulting system to fix many of the flaws and to integrate new capabilities, producing an end result much like the human/computer collaborations you're talking about, but with much tighter integration.

At a crude level of integration, it could be like a human with cybernetics. Can't remember the name of someone you met at lunch yesterday? Bring up the recording of that time period and replay it as an audio/video overlay to your current sensory input, play it back until you hear the name again. Need to perform a calculation? You see a calculator appear before you, you mentally enter the numbers and see the results.

You could start there, and then work out how to deepen the integration.

Last edited Tue Dec 11, 2012, 06:20 PM - Edit history (1)

Every neuron in the human cortex has the computing power of a labtop. The human cortex has 16 billion neurons.