Entries Tagged as ''

Brain Emulation by 2030

Over the past few years I’ve been thinking about whole brain emulation (WBE) and the required computational resources.  My conclusion is that the required technology level will be reached in the 2025 – 2030 time frame.

Although most estimates focus on calculations per second, the relevant parameters are:

  • Calculations per second
  • Memory size
  • Memory bandwidth per node
  • Inter-node communication bandwidth

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Singularity Summit 2010 – live blogging – day 2

Missed Eliezer Yudkowsky: Simplified  Humanism and Positive Futurism.

9:40 – Ramez Naam: The Digital Biome

Plenty of carrying capacity for the biome – 30-300 billion people with advanced biotech.  We are using only 1/1000 of the incident energy from the sun.  There’s no reason to crash due to lack of resources with advanced tech.  Population is predicted to level off at 10 billion.

Good points, but the Singularity is likely to happen on a shorter time scale.

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Singularity Summit 2010 – live blogging – day 1

9:30 – Missed Michael Vassar‘s talk.

9:50 – Gregory Stock is talking.  He is skeptical about progress in the bio realm.  He says that the FDA is a damper on progress, but he also says that there are difficult problems.  He brings up Alzheimer’s as an example.  I think he is underestimating the power of info tech to change the way we do bio-science.  Having read/write access to DNA, plus “in-silico” simulations will change the game.

Now he is talking about Silicon and saying that the complexity of computers rivals that of life.  And now he is talking about the rapid exponential progress in DNA technology.  As far as I understand, he is worried that we will create new life forms that will supersede humans.  He is saying that human evolution is “not exponential”. I think he means that it’s a very slow exponential compared to tech.

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Sir Martin Reese about the Future of the Cosmos

Martin talks about the future of the cosmos and our responsibility to prevent existential risks at a long now foundation seminar.

Nice to see H+ memes coming from the president of the Royal Society.

H/T Tom McCabe @ Kurzweil AI