Energy (and heat) scale quadratically with frequency in a CPU. Thus if you cut frequency by a factor of 10, and have 100 times as many cores, then you can get much better performance on fine grained parallel problems without increasing energy consumption. This is the direction that GPUs are going in. It also explains the low energy consumption of the brain: neurons fire at 100′s of Hz, vs billions of Hz in a CPU. Thus in terms of parallelism and energy consumption, the move towards GPU style computing is heading in the direction of more brain style computation. Of course the degree to which a GPU does this is still many orders of magnitude away from the brain.

Our brain is doing all this on 30 watts. Are we gonna get there with process shrinkage? Something is fundamentally amiss about the hardware path we are going down with regard to the variety of computation likely needed for AGI.

Few AGI researchers spend time on the internet arguing – they are too busy doing things. Most that I know have almost no internet presence, and don’t mention AGI in their research papers either, for fear of being labelled a crank in academic circles where they work. So keep in mind that people on things like the AGI list (which I don’t read by the way) are a very particular subset of the area.

There is a large gap between the level of sketch you have provided and a convincing design for an AGI. I think there are still some serious mountains to be climbed in the technical details of how some key parts of such a system would work.

Here it is: http://bit.ly/4yH0kG

AGI list members are currently debating about how AGI development could be funded. They are not agreeing on many aspects, and are involved in endless flame wars on the differences of each researcher approach (wasting way too much time in this fights).

I am convinced that a distributed agent based approach to AGI could be funded by social network companies if some effective social game byproducts could give real value and generate interesting feedback.

What do you think?

Marco ( @mgua on twitter )

http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_intelligence_explosion_is_happening_now/

I think one important factor that you don’t discuss is how more computer power makes solving the AGI design problem easier. Firstly, more powerful computers allow us to search larger spaces of programs looking for good algorithms. Secondly, the algorithms we need to find can be less efficient, thus we are looking for an element in a larger subspace.

Is there any solid evidence, experiment or theoretical, to the contrary? As far as I know, no.

http://alife.co.uk/essays/how_long_before_superintelligence/

See the probability density function at the bottom of the page.