The Universe saturated with intelligence in about 300 years!

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rayview

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I do not post much and this is the first time that I recommend checking out a rather short, readable, and very interesting article, but I have to make this post because it relates to something truly fasinating that I would love to hear some feed back on... You can find the article at http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0534.html

The idea is basically that intelligence is growing at an exponential rate and if you haven't become aware of the amazing speed of technological advancement now, just wait and by the time 25 years go by, when it is estimated that the brain will be fully reverse engineered and nanotechnology is in massive operation.
 
Kurzwell is one of those guys that thinks computers are brains or that brains are computers.
Brains do not need computer speed. Brains are a structure, not an algorithm.
 
What will happen if Human Memory is Full?!...

i have heard that this universe doesnt have enough Information to fill this completely...


bye!
 
True, not enough sand. But it is the combinatorial properties of brains that work. Make a neuron and you have a function that transforms combinatorial properties into useable actions.
You cannot make a single computer large enough to do anything since a computer is a linear, sequential machine and brains are nonlinear parallel structures. A neuron with n inputs would require at the very least n/2 computers. At worst it would require
sum of n + n-1 + n-2 ... + 1 computers.

This can be done now because we have $5.00 microcontrollers which are complete computers internally.
When the cost gets down to 2 cents we will start to build brains.

Harold
 
> The Universe saturated with intelligence in about 300 years!

This assumes that we are the only intelligent life in the universe that is tinkering with computers. What if ETs already had computers 50 million years ago but it went nowhere?

The advanced weapons of Mahabharat also used guided missiles etc and if they had computers they died with the war too. No computers are found in Mars or Venus...not yet anyway...

Just a thought....
 
That definitely brings up a very interesting and extremely important thing which both worries and amazes me. If there was life besides that on earth, it would have begun many millions of years ago and probably developed to stages far more advanced than ours. Many Scientists theorize that intelligent life on other planets is very very likely, so then why don't we have a universe that is all ready saturated? Ray seems to suggest that we are either in the "lead" or we may be the only place of life.

The other point, now made by kmguru, is that perhaps previous ETs had self-destructed, if this is the case then probably more than 1, everything up until now, so probably a whole lot. Hopefully this will not be the case with us, and I find it hard to believe that so much effort would go in vain.
 
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