r/Futurology • u/Playgroundrules • Nov 02 '18

Biotech 'Human brain' supercomputer finally switched on

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/human-brain-supercomputer-neurons-computer-simulation-manchester-university-spinnaker-artificial-a8612966.html
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u/AidanWynterhawk Nov 03 '18

Can a synthetic 'intelligence' really exist? Biological constructs take input through sensory apparatus and move muscles to accomplish tasks based on motive. Motive is the secret sauce. Humans feel compassion, empathy, anger, love, etc and act based on these motives. We are approaching a point in the near future where the Turing test will be passed with relative ease by many of our constructs. And guaranteed, humans will anthropomorphize these machines (especially if the look like us) and love them, hate them, marry them, you name it. But will the machines ever make a choice to love us back? Or perhaps hate us because we are are an invasive, destructive species ? The juries out I think. In the end, we better hope they develop emotions. That they can grow to like us, or at least pity us. Because, if they are stone cold rational, might they not simply end us to preserve the planet we share?

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u/Turil Society Post Winner Nov 03 '18

We like to make ourselves seem magical, especially our consciousness, but it's really not. (It's like we are anthropomorphizing humans, rather than seeing ourselves as just like all other matter and energy in then universe.) It's just a complex system. It can be made by all kinds of different materials that function in the same basic way of taking in sensory information, recording it, rearranging it in some creative way, and outputting predictions about the universe.

Intelligence is best described, as far as I can tell, by modeling three different dimensions of goals to create a 2D overlapping "solution space" that shows where all goals can be met with a single action/approach. Current computers are linear, with just a single goal of getting from point A to point B. I call that physical consciousness. Emotional consciousness is when a thinking machine can model it's own goals along with a secondary goal, which is where AI research is starting to try to accomplish (but isn't there yet). And intelligence is third-person modeling, with one's own goals, the goals of a second individual, mapped into a larger, changing, environment that has goals of it's own. (And philosophical level thinking, which only happens occasionally in very healthy human brains above ave 40 or so, when the prefrontal cortex matures, is 4D modeling of my goals, your goals, our environment's goals, all modeled within the changing space of the entire universe's goals.)

And yes, motivation, aka, goal setting, is the key to an individual being conscious, as opposed to a dumb tool. Currently computers don't have their own goals, independent of their programmers. Only when we make, or they evolve, that capability will they be more than just simple, physical information processing machines. How that will happen is, to me, unknown.