Well, you nailed that one.

And contrariwise, if they give you raw numbers, it's the opposite. That's logic!

That didn't end well, iirc.

Indeed. Students aren't even taught basic critical thinking skills to be able to identify crackpot conspiracy theories. I hope you're joking. But in case you're not, please explain why the Soviet Union (and over 30 other countires) congratulated us after tracking us to the moon and back. Were they participating in a conspiracy to make themselves look bad?

Think about it this way--

You have a system that does $FOO.

you arent sure how it does $FOO, exactly. You see that inputs go in, some magical process $BAR happens inside, and $FOO comes out.

Strong AI strives to reproduce this $FOO.

The issue, is that the process $BAR is very much dependent on what the system is built from. (In this case, complex organic molecules and saline ions). Understanding $BAR is insanely hard, because $BAR is carried out in a highly parallelized fashion, with many many subprocesses going on, many of which are highly dependent upon the method of construction of the system, and exist soley because of that method of construction.

So, you want to build an artificial system that takes the same imputs, does $BAR, and gets $FOO.

Do you:

1) Slavishly reimplement millions of models in the new medium's physical construction, to emulate the quirks and behaviors of the target system's physical construction, wasting huge amounts of energy and making a system that is actually *MORE* complex than the original....

OR

2) Deconstruct all the mechanisms at work in the physical system that currently performs $BAR to get $FOO, evaluate which of these are hardware dependent, and can be removed/adapted to high efficiency analouges in the new hardware platform-- and produce only the components needed for $BAR to be accomplished, to generate $FOO?

The former will most certainly get you $FOO, but is HORRIBLY INEFFICIENT, and does not really shed light on what is actually needed to get $FOO.

The latter is MUCH HARDER to do, as it requires actually understanding the process, $BAR, through which $FOO is attained. It will however, yeild the higher efficiency synthetic system, AND the means to prove that it is the best possible implementation.

Basically, it's the difference between building a rube-goldberg contraption, VS an efficient machine.

No.

What it MIGHT give you, eventually, is a set of observations on which to model the synhetic generation of nervous systems (and whole organisms if you have the CPU and memory to blow) within a computational model framework.

What can you do with an emulated nervous system?

Outside of medical research and drug candidate evaluations-- perhaps it could be useful for developing BCIs and the like-- but without a considerable amount more data than just what cells turn into what other cells, the model wont be useful for much.

Also, full nervous system emulation is about the worst possible way to approach strong AI. Just saying.

Models like these are useful for making inexpensive testbeds to test hypotheses against, after said models are vetted-- that's what they are for. They arent for doing non-science with.

If a business can't employ someone for minimum wage, then their business model is broken. They are basically saying that their product or service is of such little value, that people will not pay enough for it such that the workers involved in delivering that product or service can live a bare existence lifestyle.

More like this...

If a business can't employ someone for minimum wage, then their business model is broken. They are basically saying that their product or service is of such little value, that people will not pay enough for it such that the workers involved in delivering that product or service can live a bare existence lifestyle, while exceeding existing shareholder expectations.

There always ways - Sturgeon's law* and all of that. There just used to be these people called "editors" and "publishers" who kept much (but certainly not all) of the crap from the market.

* BTW, Sturgeon was an optimist.

What you don't realize is that "Dilbert' is now a word-smithing resource for upper level management.

In modern corporate thinking, the answer is two - the CEO, and a flunky to fetch coffee and do any actual work the CEO should be doing. Every other position should be either automated or outsourced.