From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Apr 04 2000 - 16:25:35 MDT
Billy Brown wrote:
>
> Mike Linksvayer wrote:
> > Both seemed to indicate that
> > today's computers simply don't have the storage or horsepower needed.
> > I can understand storage, but given an intelligent program and
> > glacially slow hardware, why can't it just be really slow?
>
> In theory it could be, if you had the storage, but the result would be
> useless. What good is a human-level AI that runs 10^6 times slower than a
> real human?
A great deal of good. It can rewrite its own source code, however
slowly. It can use the conscious thoughts as a brief adjunct to mostly
autonomic processes. It can run a lot faster on next year's hardware,
or convince IBM or some funder to buy you a lot more of this year's
hardware. You can be sure that at least you've solved the problem of
intelligence. And you can write up a Sysop seed and put it on a CD and
hand it to Eric Drexler and ask him to run it on the first nanocomputer,
thus reducing the window of vulnerability.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Member, Extropy Institute
Senior Associate, Foresight Institute
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