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wheN the siNGularity is more thaN a literary device
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selves — they tend to be no smarter than the people who write
their software.
But there are techniques for getting computers to program
themselves, based on evolution and natural selection. A program-
mer creates a system that spits out lots — thousands or even mil-
lions — of randomly generated programs. Each one is given the
opportunity to perform a computational task (say, sorting a list
of numbers from greatest to least) and the ones that solve the
problem best are kept aside while the others are erased. Now the
survivors are used as the basis for a new generation of randomly
mutated descendants, each based on elements of the code that
preceded them. By running many instances of a randomly varied
program at once, and by culling the least successful and regener-
ating the population from the winners very quickly, it is possible
to
evolve
effective software that performs as well or better than
the code written by human authors.
Indeed, evolutionary computing is a promising and exciting
field that’s realizing real returns through cool offshoots like “ant
colony optimization” and similar approaches that are showing
good results in fields as diverse as piloting military UAVs and ef-
ficiently provisioning car-painting robots at automotive plants.
So if you buy Kurzweil’s premise that computation is getting
cheaper and more plentiful than ever, then why not just use evo-
lutionary algorithms to
evolve
the best way to model a scanned-in
human brain such that it “wakes up” like Heinlein’s Mike com-
puter?
Indeed, this is the crux of Kurzweil’s argument in
Spiritual Ma-
chines
: if we have computation to spare and a detailed model of
a human brain, we need only combine them and out will pop the
mechanism whereby we may upload our consciousness to digi-
tal storage media and transcend our weak and bothersome meat
forever.
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