Turing complete: "Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster".
This view has always fascinated me: if AI is possible, it's possible right now (in terms of hardware). What's missing knowing how to do it (software inventions).
But it's true that faster hardware can open our eyes: (decades ago) the inventor of a new way to use silicon to make CPU's faster said that once the extra silicon was available, the solution was obvious to him. But before then, no one had even tried to think of it. It was already possible before, but the greater power (more silicon) made it practical to think in those terms.
"What's missing knowing how to do it (software inventions)".
Not really, the scope of the hardware plays an important role.
Consider: that you could perform the processing needed to play Half Life 2 on an abacus. But even if the abacus wielder followed the commands exactly and emulated the x86 instructions with paper and pencil, would anything actually emerge from the exercise that would be enlightening in anyway?
Probably not, since it would take a few thousand years (I'm handwaving here) to compute the contents of the first frame.
You're right, if the difference is that great. e.g. your handwaving of 1/50 sec to 4000 years, is about 50*10^11= 5,000,000,000,000 = a factor of 5 trillion (12 orders of magnitude).
I was thinking that 1 second's thought in a few months would be reasonable - but you are quite right, I don't have any real idea of the factor. Maybe that would be plausible if we found very efficient AI implementations, but the initial attempts of actually doing it at will undoubtedly be quite inefficient. And the slowness of feedback is a huge factor in coding, as well....
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Turing complete: "Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster".
This view has always fascinated me: if AI is possible, it's possible right now (in terms of hardware). What's missing knowing how to do it (software inventions).
But it's true that faster hardware can open our eyes: (decades ago) the inventor of a new way to use silicon to make CPU's faster said that once the extra silicon was available, the solution was obvious to him. But before then, no one had even tried to think of it. It was already possible before, but the greater power (more silicon) made it practical to think in those terms.
"What's missing knowing how to do it (software inventions)".
Not really, the scope of the hardware plays an important role. Consider: that you could perform the processing needed to play Half Life 2 on an abacus. But even if the abacus wielder followed the commands exactly and emulated the x86 instructions with paper and pencil, would anything actually emerge from the exercise that would be enlightening in anyway?
Probably not, since it would take a few thousand years (I'm handwaving here) to compute the contents of the first frame.
You're right, if the difference is that great. e.g. your handwaving of 1/50 sec to 4000 years, is about 50*10^11= 5,000,000,000,000 = a factor of 5 trillion (12 orders of magnitude).
I was thinking that 1 second's thought in a few months would be reasonable - but you are quite right, I don't have any real idea of the factor. Maybe that would be plausible if we found very efficient AI implementations, but the initial attempts of actually doing it at will undoubtedly be quite inefficient. And the slowness of feedback is a huge factor in coding, as well....