Quote from: gjhiggins on January 06, 2015, 12:44:56 PM

You can lose the Brain-Engineering white paper, it's tinfoil hat grade and you'd be horribly mistaken if you believe that it has a positive effect.

That article is not really a whitepaper and was misnamed: it really should have been called "Brain Hardware Parity" and now is. The actual high level network architecture for decentralized/distributed mind simulation is here: http://aishare.co/wiki/Cryptagoric_Cortical_Networks (warning: work in progress).

As to the "tinfoil hat grade", I'm not quite sure what you mean by that: this has nothing to do with conspiracy theories, it's just a basic review of recent computational neuroscience focused narrowly on performance comparisons. We now have ANNs that can replicate some specific cortical functionality very well (visual recognition), and we can use that - along with various low level metrics - to estimate the performance necessary for replicating all of the cortex, as it has a uniform architecture.

Quote from: gjhiggins on January 06, 2015, 12:44:56 PM

In essence, the coin aims to support the funding of AI research yet is based on an appeal to the popular but sadly doomed hope of the appearance of a ~~prophet~~singularity that will, as if by magic, solve all the currently-blocking AI problems.

As a field, machine learning is already making steady exponential progress. You can ignore the evidence for that progress - that's up to you.

This is simply a plan to greatly accelerate ML progress through a combination of:
* more efficient use of local compute resources (GPU neural simulation efficiency)
* an efficient distributed/decentralized architecture to leverage a wide network of GPUs
* a more efficient incentive structure

I consider myself a rationalist, and you probably do as well. The essence of rationality is updating on evidence.

I get the impression that you assign a low probability to the general possibility of near future AGI, and or this proposal in particular.

So, what future evidence would cause you to update that to a high probability?

Say in 5 to 10 years, you hear about an AI 'app' that has true adult human level intelligence - like Samantha from Her. You try it - it works, and it appears to be smarter than anyone you know. Do you still not believe?

Say in 5 years, you experience an AI 'app' that has intelligence - but only that of a 5 year old. How much would this evidence shift your belief on whether adult level AI is near?

Say sometime later this year, you read about some new neural simulation engine in the news which can simulate a full human brain equivalent with billions of neurons on a single GPU. The code/design is proven and its exciting to researchers, but initially its just simulating infant brains that don't do much, and certainly aren't interesting yet. How much would this shift your belief on whether 5-year old AI is near?

Quote from: gjhiggins on January 06, 2015, 12:44:56 PM

This fundamental contradiction between ends and means is the root of an incoherence that will prove ultimately fatal to the coin; the cracks are already beginning to show:

Quote from: Alix Istek on December 19, 2014, 09:18:53 PM

This project is in its early days - all feedback is welcome.

Quote from: Alix Istek on December 20, 2014, 11:28:39 PM

If your smarty pants friends have some specific smart criticism - we'd love to hear it.

That latter quote was sincere - not sarcastic - and any offense was unintentional. I actually really do want feedback and criticism.

Thank you for your feedback.

Cheers
-Alix