X-Message-Number: 25550 Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 05:51:07 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #25529 - #25537 To Peter Merel: I observe that human beings (at least most of them) have common sense. From my study of how brains work (which includes lots of biology, too, if you don't like biology) it's pretty clear that brains are very large networks of computers connected with connections which themselves do much more than simply transmit a signal. I believe I gave you some references from a recent NATURE on this question. The point to what Rodney Brooks was doing was that he looked at MINIMAL ways a simple animal could solve its problem of walking as an engineering device. He did NOT try to find a general algorithm for walking by an N legged device, a much harder problem. Moreover, his book was published in 2002, and it did not sound like he proposed to give up his work on these questions. If you asked me: 1. how long did I think it would be before we made a machine with humanlike common sense, I would say a long time. Our present AI machines are only pale imitations of brains, and don't even work like brains do at all. 2. what road we should take to be able to make intelligent machines, I would say that we should work on parallel networks with numbers of processors on the order of 10^11. Even if we had a single processor 10^11 times faster, it would not work like a parallel brain network (parallel machines don't act like single machines). and finally, 3. I would strongly prefer working on ways to increase our human abilities rather than making an imitation human: first, we have no reason to make competitors to ourselves, and second, even if not competitors we already have many such devices, which aren't even imitations. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25550