It’s obviously a very big deal but an eventual inevitability that this indirect interaction will eventually be direct – ie our assembly of human neurons will communicate more *directly* with the silicon assemblies rather than simply through our visual cortex. This will lead to a human intellectual enhancement that is hard to even imagine. Translation, math, and …. wow is my chess going to improve!

I think the comment about the future being about massive parallel processing as opposed to massive supercomputing is very apropos although the mention of AI is almost a couple of decades behind, except in popular literature.

AL (Artificial Life) can more easily mimic actual thought processes because like the brain’s thought process broken down to its smallest component, the firing of neurons, AL Agents are very simple and coded with a very small set of rules to follow.

Also, just like the human brain is easily the most advanced as well as most massively parallel processor in the world AL Agents can each be given a small portion of a complex task, each perform their task individually and then as they each complete their respective tasks, contribute their output to the combined output and finally coming up with an answer.

Try to write a computer program to architect a termite mound using AI based question sequences and you’ll get nowhere. Try the same thing by programming individual Agents to perform the same simple processes that their natural counterparts perform and what before was impossible becomes almost trivial.

With AL though, as opposed to AI where the “intelligence” comes from the programmer, the best AL intelligence comes from having large data sets to train on and who arguably has some of the largest datasets in the world to work with?

Google and AL seem like they were literally made for each other.

It was great talking to you in person!

Note that her talk was about search issues, the iPhone which she adores, and Google’s future:

http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/08/marissa-mayer/

After the talk I got to chat with her briefly about how search and AI will intersect in the coming years and was thrilled that she basically seems to agree with Kurzweil’s estimates of “about a decade” until conscious computing. I also spoke briefly with Jim Lanzone, ASK CEO, about this as well as Eytan Seidman of MS Search and Matt Cutts of Google search. Matt was the most pessimistic though even he felt that we’ll have conscious computing within about 45 years. He also noted this is not his specialty. I’m still not sure how much optimism about AI is clouding people’s estimates as it did back in the 70s, but I’m thinking “not much”. This is a new age for AI due to computational efficiencies and massive parallel processing and I’m looking forward to HAL 9000 wannabes though I do recommend they give them a less sinister voice…. “Dave, Dave?”….