[AI@50]
Filene Auditorium, Moore Hall
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH
Conference notes by Meg Houston Maker
Ray Kurzweil, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.
Why We Can Be Confident of Turing Test Capability Within a Quarter Century
Kurzweil demonstrates some new developments: he takes a picture of a page of his recent book, then in a few seconds we hear the text read through his laptop. This is not your daddy's OCR and text-to-speech system; it is managing the natural image distortions that arise when you take a picture of a book with a hand-held camera.
The pace of progress is not constant. The paradigm shift rate is now doubling every decade. The pace of technological evolution and of technological adoption is accelerating. Exponential systems go on until that particular paradigm runs out of steam. And then we're ready for the next paradigm.
Moore's Law was actually the fifth paradigm for computing; right before that there were vacuum tubes, which were shrinking as capacity grew exponentially. Then we got chips, and pretty soon we won't be able to get further exponential growth from our existing silicone architecture and we'll have to move to 3-dimensional chips. Intel's pretty confident these will be ready so that capacity will continue to follow that exponential trajectory predicted by Moore's Law.
But, what are the limits of growth? In computation, it looks like there are limits, but it turns out theyre not very limiting to what we're trying to do in AI. By about 2020, we'll have enough computational power to simulate all the features of the human brain. So what about the software? Some think that reverse engineering the brain will provide the ultimate source of the template of intelligence. Our brain scanning software is getting more powerful, with more resolution, each year.
What is the complexity of the human brain? There are trillions of interconnections. But there are only a few genes that control it; the design is in the genome, and the genome just doesn't have that much information in it (it has a lot of redundancies). It's managable complexity.
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