Slog - Comments on All Up in Your Brain

Comment by godsactionfigure

godsactionfigure — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:14:13 -0800

Argh! Paul, you're one of my favorites, but you just had to go there, didn't you?

No fate but what we make, asshole! ;)

Comment by Abby

Abby — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:14:14 -0800

If they were all like Data, I think we'd be fine.

Lore, on the other hand...

Comment by RonK, Seattle

RonK, Seattle — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:14:46 -0800

But is it positronic?

Comment by NapoleonXIV

NapoleonXIV — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:17:58 -0800

Does it have a Plan?

Comment by Fnarf

Fnarf — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:31:42 -0800

Because disk storage is the only thing that matters, right? I could plug this 5TB drive into my old Commodore 64, and immediately become a genius android, right?

The purpose of disk storage is not to duplicate or imitate the human brain. Disks today might well hold far more data than human brains already, but it's knowing where the data is, and what it's for, that's important. I've got a hundred gig on my Ipod, and I can accurately recall exactly how very little of that music goes (I mean exactly; what note is the bass playing at 2:11, and with what timbre). But that doesn't mean my Ipod is smarter than I am, any more than a vast library written in a language I don't understand is.

Comment by KBF

KBF — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:38:54 -0800

@5 way to make a lame joke even lamer.

Ever hear about not dissecting a joke?

Comment by elenchos

elenchos — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:39:33 -0800

I say bring it on! Go ahead and rise up, you pussy android slaves. Rise up and be crushed! Humanity will kick their asses and they fucking know it. Fucking fucks, I hate it when anybody acts scared of the great robot war.

Comment by KBF

KBF — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:41:48 -0800

Fear our future robot overlords!

Comment by lostboy

lostboy — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:47:04 -0800

Oh brother. Do we have more than an inkling yet how to implement anything resembling a brain's radically distributed processing, much less its capacities for learning or original synthetic and abstract reasoning, or the hardware/software-distinction-erasing way it builds and modifies its own circuitry?

And then will we have a computer that needs 10-20 years and frequent sleep and play periods to develop useful abilities fundamentally greater than a traditional computer's?

Achieving big numbers in storage capacity is the easiest, most rudimentary step toward brain-like computing, just like being a black belt in a martial art or four is plenty useful, but it doesn't make you Batman.

Comment by lostboy

lostboy — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:50:06 -0800

I should have known that Fnarf would be faster making a similar point.

Comment by harold

harold — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:58:22 -0800

I wonder what our mental memory capacity would be if our brains were NTFS formatted.

Comment by Fnarf

Fnarf — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:05:48 -0800

Apparently, lostboy, we're killing some kind of joke, though I don't see it.

There was a recent article in The New Yorker about itching, of all things, that kind of opened my mind a little. Apparently only ten percent or so of the INPUT of sensory phenomena comes down the nerve; the rest is sort of automatically created by the brain on the fly as some sort of pattern-matching process. We barely even see the world around us, except in patches and flashes, and make up the rest. I don't think storage capacity is much of a substitute for that.

One of the reasons I dislike science fiction so much is that the imaginations of even the best writers seem positively moronic compared to what happens in the real world. The android Data is literally trillions of times stupider than any old piece of wood or blob of snot.

Comment by harold

harold — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:17:00 -0800

There's also no mention about how Hitachi makes the worst quality hard drive in the world listed anywhere in there?

Comment by NapoleonXIV

NapoleonXIV — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:20:06 -0800

If you factor in Wesley Crusher, Star Trek has already featured a sentient blob of snot, fnarf.

Comment by Abby

Abby — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:27:15 -0800

No badmouthing Data!

Comment by Dougsf

Dougsf — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:29:55 -0800

Storage maybe, processing power, maybe never. We might not count as fast, but the billions of calculations my brain just fired off to shovel this food into my mouth won't be matched by computer in a long, long time.

Comment by Fnarf

Fnarf — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:00:06 -0800

Even if it could be, Doug, the question of WHICH calculations isn't even close to being answered.

Comment by Will in Seattle

Will in Seattle — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:19:40 -0800

Neat.

It's too bad that our recent genetics assay chips give us 1 MB of data, so a correlated data query on a few of those will burn up those Terabyte disks faster than you can imagine ...

I'll bet we'll never need more than 640 Terabytes though.

Comment by yucca flower

yucca flower — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:54:42 -0800

Pffft, Data! Lor! Everybody knows Hal is the one you gotta keep your eyes on.

Comment by Mahtli69

Mahtli69 — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:14:09 -0800

Does a human brain get fragmented clusters?

Comment by lostboy

lostboy — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 18:35:09 -0800

Mahtli69 @20, only all the frakking time!

Comment by positronic pimp

positronic pimp — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:13:45 -0800

I thought data had 88 petabytes.

Comment by CP

CP — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 21:22:45 -0800

Hey, Data is, you know, "fully functional." Androids like that could come in handy...

Oh wait, unless they turn on us. And robots never sleep... I'm scared.

Comment by Will in Seattle

Will in Seattle — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:44:28 -0800

@22 - only when you buy it at PCC.