Friday, May 14, 2010

Anirban Bandyopadhyay

“Like Neurons in the Brain”: A Molecular Computer That Evolves | h+ Magazine

Just too cool a name to not put in the title. Looks like "termination will come from the North" ... leave way too many young single nerds and geeks, with way too few young women to connect them to the real world up in the really really isolated snow and cold and "wala"; they build a brain. We would really be better served to use "stimulus money" to send them young women or snowmobiles to save us from potential victimization by killing machines from the north. Might actually be the first thing that would be an appropriate usage for the name "stimulus".

There actually are some very seriously smart folks that are worried about evil runaway technology.

I followed this thread in the late '90s and my view is that it is a bigger worry than Global Warming, but probably less of a worry than some sort of natural cataclysm ... asteroid, super volcano like Yellowstone, big solar flare, oddness from magnetic pole shift, plague ... etc, the "list of doom" is unsurprisingly long for thoughtful people, and at least hints at divine intervention being responsible for us existing. Take yourself out of the bounds of human recorded history, into geologic and universal time and it is clear that while it is very true that we live in a "Goldilocks Universe" (not too anything, but JUST right).

Even so, we generally flatter ourselves -- from historically finding ourselves the center of everything, to now being certain we can destroy the planet with nukes and believing that moving existing carbon from one state to another will do the trick. Maybe, but I can guarantee that all the folks of that opinion will die -- the planet? Not so much.

Seriously, it sounds like some pretty amazing research, and if some form of strongish AI capability is going to happen anytime soon, the combination of molecular and evolutionary technologies as seemed the most likely to me for some time.


No comments:

Post a Comment