Neurons vs. Transistors: was Re: longevity vs singularity

Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Tue, 27 Jul 1999 17:31:09 -0700 (PDT)

paul@i2.to writes:

> How many thousands is the real question. I suspect you're looking at 100's of
> thousands. Sure, once you achieve the proper transistor density, the next
> challenge is actually hooking them up in such a way as to accurately
> emulate the entire spectrum of neurochemical activity! :-)

Talk is cheap. Can you gives us numbers?

> Therefore, my primary position is that the gap between uploading
> and human-level AI is much narrower than is often argued.

Gap in which context? Brute-force uploading (aka neuroemulation) requires many orders of magnitude more power than straight bred AI. And the translation procedure to the more compact target encoding is nonobvious (i.e. I do have hints, but can't be sure it's going to work).