[Brain evolution]
> Obviously, but the design change need not be perfect or even good, just a
> little better than contemporaries who made no change at all. With a design
> philosophy that mediocre it's no wonder that in just a few years, almost
> certainly (much?) less than a century, we'll be able to make brains as
good
> as those that took nature 3 billion years to come up with, and then go far
> beyond.
I think it will take less than 30 years. What we need is to move the brain
to a scalable component software architecture (after which we can use
nanotech to sprawl our grey matter across the universe). Hopefully we wont
have to make artificial brains as smart as our brain, instead we can meet
half way and then merge the two together (we add computer components to our
brain, the computer adds human components to its brain). This should happen
when computers develop the ability to learn from us, personal computers
should evolve to be similar to their users; making the convergence of the two
architectures easier.
After we're scalable and we have all the parallel operations per second we
can possibly build. It's time to explore new forms of thinking and learning.
I'm sure that shear speed will not "magically" give us the ability to
understand more, just process information faster. It's time to start
thinking of what lies beyond our current state consciousness. Are there
other forms of thought we can adopt? How about conscious memes, each
exploring different situations as individuals to give us a fresh perspective
on new situations (so our old minds aren't put to shame by fresh young ones)?
--Wax