Quote from: Shattered on February 04, 2015, 10:36:54 PM

This was actually pretty funny...It didnt click until i read the the Sarah Connor part.
Well played

Don't get me wrong, I understand Bitcoin with smart contracts would only be general AI, the "Chinese Room" type but it is still is the foundation for the beginning of strong AI.

The Singularity (Strong AI):

The human brain doesn't need to build a smarter brain. It just needs to build something of equivalent smartness (which should be theoretically possible, there's no reason to believe the human brain is the upper bound for all generalised reasoning ability) on a substrate like silicon which is subject to Moore's Law (and thus gets inherently faster with time) and which is immortal and duplicable.

Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and:

- 18 months later you can build one that's twice as fast using the same principles

- duplicate this brain and get the power of multiple people thinking together (but with greater bandwidth between them than any human group)

- run this brain for 100 years and get an older intellectually functioning human than has ever existed before

- duplicate whatever learning this brain has accumulated over 100 years (which, say, brings to the level of an Einstein) as many times as you have physical resources for (so, clone Einstein)
All those are paths to super-human AI from the production of a human-intelligence brain in a non-biological form.

So, if a human brain can make a computer brain, which is a reasonable assumption, then a human brain can make a brain smarter than itself.

Building a human brain in a non-biological substrate is not a miracle. It would be a miracle in the same way that transistors and penicillin are, not in the way that Jesus' resurrection is. I.e., a fantastic, happy, unlikely but possible event that will change the world for the better.

We know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the evidence for that claim inside billions of skulls. The question is then not to push the theoretical boundaries of computational capability beyond some theoretical level - but merely to achieve it again artificially.