All Over Albany

Hold the robot apocalypse

Evolutionary neurobiologist -- and Guilderland resident -- Mark Changizi, writing in Psychology Today about why the robot uprising is far, far off -- if ever (links added):

Reverse engineering is, indeed, part and parcel of [Ray] Kurzweil's near-future: the brain will be reverse-engineered in a couple decades, he believes. As a neurobiological reverse-engineer myself, I am only encouraged when I find researchers -- whether at a moonbase or in the bowels of the Earth -- taking seriously the adaptive design of the brain, something often ignored or actively disapproved of within neuroscience. One finds similar forefront recognition of reverse engineering in the IBM cat brain and the European Blue Brain projects.

And there's your problem for the several-decade time-frame for the singularity! Reverse-engineering something as astronomically complex as the brain is, well, astronomically difficult -- possibly the most difficult task in the universe. Progress in understanding the functions carried out by the brain is not something that comes simply with more computational power. In fact, determining the function carried out by some machine (whether a brain or a computer program) is not generally computable at all (it is one of those undecidability results from the 20th century).

Changizi's next book is called Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man.

Changizi (that's him on the right) was until recently a professor at RPI. He's moved on to become director of human cognition at 2AI Labs.

photo via Mark Changizi site