Alt Text: an image of Agent Smith from The Matrix with the following text superimposed, “1999 was described as being the peak of human civilization in ‘The Matrix’ and I laughed because that obviously wouldn’t age well and then the next 25 years happened and I realized that yeah maybe the machines had a point.”
I mean, no, not really. We know what thinking is. It’s neurons firing in your brain in varying patterns.
What we don’t know is the exact wiring of those neurons in our brain. So that’s the current challenge.
But previously, we couldn’t even effectively simulate neurons firing in a brain, AI algorithms are called that because they effectively can simulate the way that neurons fire (just using silicon) and that makes them really good at all the fuzzy pattern matching problems that computers used to be really bad at.
So now the challenge is figuring out the wiring of our brains, and/or figuring out a way of creating intelligence that doesn’t use the wiring of our brains. Both are entirely possible now that we can experiment and build and combine simulated neurons at ballpark the same scale as the human brain.
Aren’t you just saying the same thing? We know it has something to do with the neurons but couldn’t figure it out exactly how
The distinction is that it’s not ‘something to do with neurons’, it’s ‘neurons firing and signalling each other’.
Like, we know the exact mechanism by which thinking happens, we just don’t know the precise wiring pattern necessary to recreate the way that we think in particular.
And previously, we couldn’t effectively simulate that mechanism with computer chips, now we can.