I've been thinking about this for a while. To do the really interesting things, to interpret sound, music, language, visual surroundings... how we do these things is so vastly different from how computers do them. In our brains we have very roughly 100 billion neurons, with (on average, very roughly) 1000 connections each. Not to mention that our senses add yet more information (our ears have hairs that vibrate at different frequencies, adding further parallel processing ability beyond what a pc-connected microphone would do). Whereas your pc for the last few decades has been doubling in number of transistors every year or two, effectively doubling processing speed each time. Even with a small number of multiple cores, computer ability to process information in parallel is so far removed from ours. And it may remain the same for some time unless there's some work to make artificial computer cells that can self replicate. I think we're at a point where we know a little bit about how things could work but we have no idea how little we know about how to actually get there. Pcs for now are in many ways glorified calculators and we're not using them for anything particularly interesting. Data storage and access, games and entertainment are all about sensory illusion that there's more happening than is really happening. Consider even how much we revolve around our own senses that we have no way with our own eyes to tell apart a red and green light, both shining from the same point,from an actual yellow light. The consumer pc industry largely drives advancement and innovation. Consumer dollars to Intel and AMD and the like, advance processing power in a way that leads to only faster boring computers. How about microphones that pick up a huge range of frequencies? Cameras that capture more than just pixels (contours are an important part of our visual processing... curved and straight lines). And of course, to really think deep we're going to have to have much much much better multi-processing with the ability to remap connections to learn in whole new ways with a flexibility to rival the human brain. That is, unless we really can, à la Watson, use huge amounts of meta information, highly contextual information from the internet to substitute for the lower level building blocks of thinking. Watson doesn't really know what a table is. Watson has a bunch of definitions, but human level knowledge includes the ability to recognise many different kinds of tables from many angles, to predict strength and varied use purposes ( I can see it's wood, it could probably hold this much weight, I could break it with this kind of tool, or disassemble it and make this other kind of thing), and has even less knowledge about what the words "is", "of", "but" mean.

I've been thinking about this for a while. To do the really interesting things, to interpret sound, music, language, visual surroundings... how we do these things is so vastly different from how computers do them. In our brains we have very roughly 100 billion neurons, with (on average, very roughly) 1000 connections each. Not to mention that our senses add yet more information (our ears have hairs that vibrate at different frequencies, adding further parallel processing ability beyond what a pc-connected microphone would do). Whereas your pc for the last few decades has been doubling in number of transistors every year or two, effectively doubling processing speed each time. Even with a small number of multiple cores, computer ability to process information in parallel is so far removed from ours. And it may remain the same for some time unless there's some work to make artificial computer cells that can self replicate. I think we're at a point where we know a little bit about how things could work but we have no idea how little we know about how to actually get there. Pcs for now are in many ways glorified calculators and we're not using them for anything particularly interesting. Data storage and access, games and entertainment are all about sensory illusion that there's more happening than is really happening. Consider even how much we revolve around our own senses that we have no way with our own eyes to tell apart a red and green light, both shining from the same point,from an actual yellow light. The consumer pc industry largely drives advancement and innovation. Consumer dollars to Intel and AMD and the like, advance processing power in a way that leads to only faster boring computers. How about microphones that pick up a huge range of frequencies? Cameras that capture more than just pixels (contours are an important part of our visual processing... curved and straight lines). And of course, to really think deep we're going to have to have much much much better multi-processing with the ability to remap connections to learn in whole new ways with a flexibility to rival the human brain. That is, unless we really can, Ã la Watson, use huge amounts of meta information, highly contextual information from the internet to substitute for the lower level building blocks of thinking. Watson doesn't really know what a table is. Watson has a bunch of definitions, but human level knowledge includes the ability to recognise many different kinds of tables from many angles, to predict strength and varied use purposes ( I can see it's wood, it could probably hold this much weight, I could break it with this kind of tool, or disassemble it and make this other kind of thing), and has even less knowledge about what the words "is", "of", "but" mean.

Ah, sorry. The "without now" threw off the whole cadence of my reading. I guess I was expecting a comma or an extra word. Me creating extra confusion to the confusion... Without having the flow of the sentence I wondered if you meant bricks as physical pc/sever "box"es (my home box runs Gentoo, my work box runs Debian etc). Lack of sleep. Was genuinely baffled. I'll accept any takeaways about my intelligence/reading ability/trollishness humbly.

I had to read this sentence four times to parse it. I hate to whine, but could this kind of thing please kindly be edited before it's on the front page?

Original text:

A sane edit: