If you're anything like me, you like awake at night thinking of all kinds of things, unable to fall asleep. Lately I've been thinking a lot about neural nets and the possibility of creating extremely powerful AI from the ground up to behave like a human brain, or even better. The human brain contains somewhere around 100 billion neurons. If each one were a bit, that would only be 11-12 gigabytes. In today's world, that's not very much. Of course a neural net would have a lot more overhead than just 1 bit per neuron, but say you used 64 bits -- still less than 1TB. Easily achievable if it used hard drive access. Slower, but probably still faster than the human brain. I mean, imagine just setting up a computer where all it did was behave as a brain -- throw a webcam and microphone on it and teach it. Maybe throw on a simple robotic arm for kicks. Have it play with some blocks. You wouldn't even need to go that far. Just simple text based I/O could potentially generate some fascinating results. Teach it to read, then point it toward Wikipedia or something. Of course the downside is that, like a real brain, it could potentially take years of teaching before it did anything useful.
But would it become sentient? Self-aware? If you could accurately simulate a brain virtually, would it be that different from a real brain? Could a virtual brain be even more powerful? I think a human brain probably runs under 1MHz while computers are well over 1GHz. It could potentially function thousands of times faster. What if you just threw a huge neuron matrix at it with no real structure and simply let it self-evolve? Could it even generate a structure superior to our own brains? Probably not, but it's still fun to think about.
Well, there's a glimpse of one of the things that keeps me tossing and turning at night and struggling to wake up in the morning. What about the rest of you?
