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by insertion 4066 days ago
The article ends like this: "As Cowen puts it, 'what are humans still good for?'"

For the most part, programmers program better than programs. It's amazing to think about the possibilities as this statement becomes less true.
1 comments
aswanson 4066 days ago
Programmers are not better than programs if the program it is competing against is a black-scholes estmator, compiler, interpreter, or assembler, and time is an input to the cost function.
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hmate9 4066 days ago
Compiler, interpreter or an assembler is basically a translator. It doesn't have to think, it is simple computation following a set of rules, of course a computer would win in that case.

But can a computer write code from scratch as good as a human? No(t yet).

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aswanson 4066 days ago
Human minds are nothing more than computers running on unoptimized substrates. It's only a short matter of time on an evolutionary scale before machines surpass.
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Certhas 4066 days ago
unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations.

That part of your sentence is wrong, the rest (minds are nothing more than computers running on substrate) is wrong or meaningless, too. It just so happens that computation of the Turing model is one of the things human minds do, and badly. It's very much not the only thing. (Unless you mean computer in a sufficiently vague and abstract way as for the statement to be vacuous.)

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aswanson 4066 days ago
unoptimized? Hardly. Evolution has optimized our nerve systems for the task of heuristic information processing over tens or hundreds of million of iterations in parallel over billions of different implementations.

The biological method of information processing, calcium ion transfer, is demonstrably orders of magnitude slower than artificially devised methods by semiconductors. So this is physically not optimal and easily proved. So that part of my sentence is correct.

The rest of your comment is too ill-defined to refute, unless you hold that there is some non-material, extra-physical quantity of mental process that cannot be duplicated by engineering.

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jacquesm 4065 days ago
Having slower individual components running at ridiculously low power is a valid optimization because it allows very close packing of those components and levels of interconnection that we can only dream of in our designed systems.

The optimization is a subtle one but extremely powerful, and it will be a while before we can pack equivalent computational power in something of similar size and power requirements.

Think about the amount of hardware required to simulate a cat brain at reduced speed, then think about the amount of hardware in a cat brain.

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Turing_Machine 4065 days ago
People have been making this claim since computers have existed, and it hasn't happened yet. It's similar to the way that fusion power is always 20 years away.

I think it will happen eventually, but given the long record of failed predictions in this area, I think that a blanket statement that it's going to be a "short matter of time" is unwarranted.

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