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Saturday, September 05, 2015

How To

"How To Build A Brain" has been the title of a surprising number of "tech" articles and talks in not one of which has a brain been built.

8 comments:

jimf said...

Dining **with** a superintelligent upload:

Ramez Naam, _Nexus_, Chapter 17, "VIP"
-------------------
The restaurant was called Ayutthaya, after the ancient Thai capital.
It occupied a gorgeously ornate three-story building situated
on the bank of a river. . .

They rounded the Buddha and the restaurant spread out before them.
Floor-to-ceiling windows were cast open to the warm night.
They framed the river and the Grand Palace beyond it. Through
more windows and to the south the spire of Wat Arun rose above
the west bank. Gold and orange lanterns illuminated ornate
tables with tourists and Thai alike.

They crossed a tiny bridge -- over a softly gurgling stream
that ran through the dining room and emptied itself into the
Chao Phraya below. . .

The hostess led him up to a rooftop deck. There was a cool
breeze from the river. . . All sorts of delicious scents
assailed him. . .

The hostess steered him towards a table at the south-eastern
corner of the rooftop, where the most majestic view of the river
and temples would be. Su-Yong Shu rose to greet him, a wide
smile on her face. . .

(Chapter 18, "Ayutthaya")

"I love it here," she said. She gestured at Wat Arun, soaring
above them. "Humans create so much beauty."

Humans, Kade observed to himself. Not "we". Humans

The waiter came with water and tea, walked them through
the menu.

"Everything looks so incredible," Kade commented.

She smiled. "Let me. You'll be happy."

"I'm in your hands."

Shu rattled off a stream of high-speed Thai to the waiter,
who smiled broadly, and backed away. . .

The food arrived. . .

The waiter presented each small dish with fanfare.

Yum Mamuang, a delicious mango salad.

Pad Pak Boong, fried morning glory.

Goong Kra Tiem, savory garlic fried shrimp.

Ped bai Gra-pow, basil duck.

Phat goo-ay-dtee-o neu-a, stir-fried noodles and sliced
beef.

They ate family style. . .
====


Dining to **create** the first superintelligent upload:


http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/goertzel20150906
-------------------

The First Earthly Superintelligence Will Be an Incremental Mind-Upload of the Global Brain
By Ben Goertzel
Multiverse According to Ben
Posted: Sep 6, 2015

Recently I was sitting in a late-night dinner meeting in Tsim Sha Tsui, in a private
room overlooking the spectacular Hong Kong harbor, with

- a robot head/face genius
- a robot body genius
- an expert on outsourcing manufacturing of complex products to Chinese factories
- a former toy and entertainment company executive

and discussing the possibility of coming together to make an amazing AI-powered
humanoid robot. . .

After a few glasses of excellent wine, I started thinking about all the trends and
patterns that had come together to bring us to that restaurant to discuss that
project. All the trends that had converged to make Guangdong Province the
world center of consumer electronics manufacturing. . .
====


Foodies will bring about the Singularity. Whadd'dya think, The Future was
going to be invented at **McDonald's**?

;->

jimf said...

Also from
The First Earthly Superintelligence Will Be an Incremental Mind-Upload of the Global Brain
By Ben Goertzel
Multiverse According to Ben
Posted: Sep 6, 2015


http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/goertzel20150906
------------

. . .

Maybe the first AGI will not be a mind-upload of any human, nor a purely
engineered intelligent mind—maybe the first AGI will be a mind-upload of
the Global Brain.

Indeed, once this is said it seems almost trivial and obvious.
Of course it will be. . .
===


I remember thinking back when the LessWrong kerfuffle about "Roko's Basilisk"
was current, a few years ago, how fortuitously coincidental that Iain Banks'
penultimate Culture novel _Surface Detail_ had just been published
(containing the notion of AI-driven virtual Hells).
( http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2012/02/jim-hes-dead.html ).

Goertzel's insight, above, sounds an awful lot like the source of Ava's
Big Data-base in _Ex Machina_,
https://thecreatorsproject-images.vice.com/content-images/contentimage/no-slug/0cc9ba522231f85835c592e625da8ff7.jpg

I wonder how many of the folks at that Hong Kong table had seen
the movie. Not that I'm suggesting deliberate plagiarism, you understand --
these notions float through the air like pollen, to lodge and sprout
in the unconscious.

Op. cit.
------------
And I started to feel how, for sure, my individual self and my feelings of will
and purpose and so forth, were mostly just being swept along by large forces and
trends. . . Somehow, it seemed, we had all been gathered there via sociocultural
forces beyond our control and comprehension, because the universe wanted amazing
humanoid robots built, and we were a reasonable team of people to do it. . .
====

Forces, and trends. And movies. ;->

Dale Carrico said...

In The Future hacks will still describe streams as "softly gurgling."

Dale Carrico said...

"my individual self and my feelings of will and purpose and so forth, were mostly just being swept along by large forces and trends... Somehow, it seemed, we had all been gathered there via sociocultural forces beyond our control and comprehension, because the universe wanted amazing humanoid robots built, and we were a reasonable team of people to do it..."

A highly symptomatic passage, not least given that the Universe doesn't look to have much in the way of "wants" for people happening to live in it particularly. The conjuration of the "reasonable team" of which he is part and which is doing god's work (what "the universe want[s]") is conjured through the disavowal of the initial confession of a self, purpose, understanding (that "and so forth" contains quite a lot of unspeakable dread) "being swept along by large forces and trends... beyond control and comprehension." It is this feeling of incomprehension and impotence that renders the futurological ideology attractive in the first place -- note well the insistence that historical/sociocultural forces that a sociologist or historian would be apt to describe as "structural" are here denominated "trends," that quintessential futurological buzzword -- the adoption of a narrative genre that "somehow" transforms the existential panic of powerless incomprehension into the megalomaniacal assumption of the guise of would-be god.

jimf said...

> In The Future hacks will still describe streams as "softly gurgling."

I'd be afraid that more than the stream might be gurgling (softly or
not) after a meal like that.

The restaurant apparently actually exists. I don't know if it's as fancy
as described in the novel.

http://www.bangkokpost.com/lifestyle/4068_info_good-view-restaurant-ayutthaya.html
--------------
The Good View restaurant is situated along the Chao Phraya River and
offers good food in a relaxing and picturesque atmosphere. Try out
its popular Thai seafood specialties.
====

Dale Carrico said...

I much prefer the Restaurant at the End of the Universe myself.

jimf said...

> "How To Build A Brain"

Brain and brain! What is brain?

The Machine is dead; long live the machine!
It seems HP can't make memristors after all, Moore's
the pity, but maybe Knowm knows how!

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2015/09/09/this-startup-has-a-brain-inspired-chip-for-machine-learning/
-----------
A Chip Inspired By Nature

At the core of Knowm’s technology is its memristor. The concept of the memristor
isn’t new to the company – it was first theorized in the 1970s – but Nugent and
his company have done a lot to put it into practice.
====

HP? H Who?

"Synapses come and go constantly – and half the time they don’t work right."
So bring on the Popular Mechanic:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a16308/memcomputer-quantum-computing-alternative/
-----------
Meet The Memcomputer: The Brain-Like Alternative to Quantum Computing
This computer works like the brain: It stores and processes info simultaneously
by William Herkewitz
Jul 3, 2015

. . .

In a single blast the memcomputer will set up a maze, have electricity
run it, and store which the numbers combined with the first number to
add up to 10.
====

I guess that makes it -- what? -- a kind of analog computer?
(Except analog computers are hard to "program", and their uses
tend to be rather specialized.)

But speaking of memcomputer (lane) -- the name "Popular Mechanics" suddenly reminded
me of an irritating joke my late (late) grandfather used to tease
me with when I was a little kid. He'd ask,
"Are you a mechANic or a MECHanic?" (The former,
correctly-stressed version of the word being his term for a competent mechanic,
and the latter, incorrectly-stressed one, being his humorous term
for an incompetent one, or just an all-around klutz, though I doubt
he originated the joke.).

I had no appreciation for my grandfather's sense of humor in
those days. ;->

jimf said...

> It seems HP can't make memristors after all, Moore's
> the pity, but maybe Knowm knows how!

http://knowm.org/the-problem-is-not-memristors-its-how-hp-is-trying-to-use-them/
----------------
While I have to admit the miscommunication between HP’s research and
business development departments is starting to get really old, I do
understand the problem, or at least part of it.

When an organization gets as large as HP they become fragmented. The people
who make the decisions at the top do not understand the technology being
developed and technical problems being faced at the bottom. Market and
company politics create top-down objectives that the people at the
bottom try desperately to fulfill. This environment works only for
established technology and solutions, because that is the only thing
all the people in the organization understand. When it comes to [a completely
new techology] we have a problem. You can’t force a technology to be
something other than what it is -- you have to embrace the reality.
When an organization gets large and fractured, this reality can get
lost in translation as it is passed up the ladder. HP is clearly having
issues with their device, but that is not the end of the story. . .
Since HP’s announcements seven years ago, a number of other material stacks
have been developed and demonstrated. . . [W]e are now just entering
the market with discrete devices for neuromorphic computing research. . .
To be perfectly honest HP’s announcement is more than a little irritating,
and I’m not the only one who feels that way.

> If this were 2010, I’d say they must be doing this on purpose to keep
> computer progression held back, but the problem is HP no longer has a
> monopoly on memristors. Crossbar is releasing memristors in their own
> products this year, and that’s not including various other memristor
> tech such as Nantero’s new technology. Now HP is just screwing themselves.
>
> -- Yuli-Ban via Reddit
====

This reminds me of a New York Times book review I read a couple
of days ago:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/books/review/the-silo-effect-by-gillian-tett.html
----------------
‘The Silo Effect,’ by Gillian Tett
By CHRIS HAYES
SEPT. 2, 2015

If you’ve ever worked for a large organization, you’ve probably had some
version of the following experience: A project you’ve been working on for
months is now going to be canceled because some other part of the organization
was also working on a similar project, and apparently no one in your
department even knew. Or: You find out some crucial piece of information
or equipment you’ve been desperately searching for actually exists within
your company, secretly hoarded by some rival internal faction that wanted
to make sure no one else got to play with their proverbial toys.

The experience is so common, there are lots of ways to describe it — the left
hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, turf battles — but the term the
financial journalist Gillian Tett chooses in her new book is “silos.”
In the past decade ­“silo-busting” has become one of those buzzy management
ideas you find everywhere from start-ups to lefty nonprofits, and in a
series of case studies. . . Tett attempts to show us how silos can undermine
organizations and how they can be overcome. . .

“[O]ctopus pots,” [is] the more comprehensible term to the Japanese. . .
====

Not precisely analogous, but the common theme seems to be miscommunication.

But a large corporation like HP throwing in the towel on a technology
surely creates a massive PR and (venture capital) credibility
problem for a small startup trying to promote the same kind of
tech.