Humanity+ publication covering transhumanism, brain-computer interfaces, artificial general intelligence, life extension, and related futurist ideas.
HN links it for transhumanism pieces on brain uploading, open-source medicine, and AGI; commenters mostly cite its articles and point to Humanity+ rather than judge quality.
The following is more tangentially related to the article then a direct comment about the interesting points it makes.
An interesting hypothesis I read about aging was that it's an anticancer mechanism necessary to become old enough to reproduce.
The cellular metabolic process creates a lot free radicals that cause damage, while the body has built in mechanisms to repair the damage at high rates of replication the chance of damage resulting in turning on an oncogene increases.
In order to combat this the body slows down its division process to prevent the likelihood of cancer but as a side effect we experiencing the symptoms of aging and inevitable death (usually by cancer if you live long enough to get it).
Not sure if any of this is accurate, but the idea is interesting and something I hadn't thought of. It also introduces problems since if at all accurate trying to prevent aging may result in higher cancer risk.
Talk of this also reminds me of a quote I like (from http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/13/longevity-science-needs-documentation/):
"We all express the symptoms of a fatal, inherited degenerative condition called aging - or so the joke goes. It's a dark joke, but there's truth to be found in it, as is often the case in black humor. Unfortunately, all too few people think of themselves as patients suffering aging, and fewer still would call themselves patient advocates, agitating for research leading towards therapies and cures for aging. This is a sorry state…
Exactly this. Conscious information processing constitutes only a tiny part of the processing within the brain. Real computational power of the brain is in the order of petaflops to exaflops 1).
On the other hand, AZ used a lot more than 1E18 calculations of training to beat human level play, so that part is also wrong. In fact, the total processing power of the 5000 TPU's used are in the order of 1E17 operations per second.
Still, since 1E17 flops is comparable (within 1-2 orders of magnitude) to the human brain's raw capacity, and AZ could reach superhuman level in GO in less than 10 hours, that means that AZ can be seen as more efficient than human brains at GO (in terms of learning rate/calculation, not necessarily per watt)
This should also not be surprising. After all, GO (like chess) is a very abstract game, far removed from the tasks that the biological brain has evolved to do well.
For tasks that the brain does well, such as pattern recognition in the environment that humans live, the human brain is still much more efficient. A human can learn to drive a car in 10's of hours, while AI's still require millions of hours of training, and they still end up inferior.
So, in the end, the title is correct (and also common knowledge for anyone following this development), even if almost all of the content in the article is way off.
Was this a high school essay?
1) http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/
A very interesting article, I just wish whatever ad plugins they have going didn't constantly crash Chrome.
Those disembodied lungs are amazing. And incredibly creepy. The business plan -- patching up donor lungs not approved for transplant (which is most of them) and keeping them alive long enough to find a patient they can save... to the tune of perhaps 2,000 lungs and lives per year. That's pretty amazing. Approved in Canada and awaiting FDA approval as well? That's incredible. I couldn't find a news reports of their first rejuvenated lung, the article doesn't really give much detail on how the procedure went.
Martine, I'm sure YC would want her at their Female Founder's Conference! ;-)
Some other interesting posts I found;
Martine Rothblatt - The Trans-Everything CEO http://nymag.com/news/features/martine-rothblatt-transgender-ceo/
Book Review: Virtually Human by Martine Rothblatt
http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/09/09/book-review-virtually-human-martine-rothblatt/
United Therapeutics Website
http://www.unither.com/
Anotehr article about the same study: http://hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/precognition-real-cornell-university-lab-releases-powerful-new-evidence-human-mind-can-
From the article : "The sequencing of the pictures on these trials was randomly determined by a randomizing algorithm … and their left/right target positions were determined by an Araneus Alea I hardware-based random number generator."
At the very least they were using Araneus Alea wich is a hardware random number generator, so the numbers were not predictable. It's possible that the "randomizing algorithm" did something dumb and made the sequence not random, but I doubt it.
I think that it's more likely thet the sudy was done so many times that it eventually gave significant results than it is that the sequence was not random. Or maybe prescience is real to some degree, or the study is a statistical glitch.
However the replication package they provide has the compiled program without the source code, and that is a red flag to me.
Here's an interesting article on that:
http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/07/26/hear-that-its-the-singularity-coming/
"A common misnomer about the Singularity and the idea of greater-than-human AI is that it will involve a conscious, self-reflective, and even morally accountable agent. This has led some people to believe that it will have deep and profound thoughts, quote Satre, and resultantly act in a quasi-human manner. This will not be the case. We are not talking about artificial consciousness or even human-like cognition. Rather, we are talking about super-expert systems that are capable of executing tasks that exceed human capacities. It will stem from a multiplicity of systems that are individually singular in purpose, or at the very least, very limited in terms of functional scope. And in virtually all cases, these systems won’t reflect on the consequences of their actions unless they are programmed to do so."
Green500 top supercomputer, gets 65Gflops/W.
65Gflops/W = 6.5e10 operations per joule = 2.34×10^17 per kWh
Assume $0.05/kWh electricity: (2.34×10^17 operations/kWh) / ($0.05/kWh) = 4.68×10^18 operations per US dollar
Human brain computational estimates are all over the place, but one from ages ago is 36.8×10^15 flops ≈ 3.7e16 operations/second ≈ 1.3e20 operations/hour: https://hplusmagazine.com/2009/04/07/brain-chip/
This is equivalent to a human that costs $28.31/hour.
Of course, as we haven't actually done this yet, we don't know if that computational estimate is correct, nor if we do or don't need to give it off-hours and holidays.
Still, general explanation is there's a lot of room for improvement when it comes to energy efficiently in computation; calling this Moore's Law may be inaccurate, but the reality happens to have rhymed thus far.