Artificial intelligence, who are we?

Introduction

The problem of creating artificial intelligence has been actively discussed over the past few years, experiments are being conducted, supercomputers are involved, and sufficient funds are spent on studying the problem. In this article I will not be able to answer the question whether this is good or bad, and what can be expected from a rebel machine, but I will try to clarify the current state of affairs.

Neuron

What is a neuron? Let's see if the “building blocks” of which our consciousness consists are so complex.


If we imagine a cell as a black box, then we can say that through “dendrites” (fastenings of “synapses”) the neuron receives data, and through “axon” it produces a result. Very similar to the usual function, the values ​​from the “dendrites” are passed as parameters, and the return returns the calculated value of the signal on the “axon”.
If we drop out of the cell everything that supports it as a living organism, in the dry residue we get:


N numeric inputs -> input signal adder -> activation function -> output value.
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Where:
1 - input signals
2 - adder
3 - activation function (for simplicity, any function)
4 - axon (neuron output)

So trepanning

At school, in a biology class, Mari Ivanovna told us what the brain is and why it serves man.
Let's see more in detail: what can we see after trepanning? Pink something - a full-fledged "supercomputer", weighing a couple of kilograms.

	Brain	Intel core i7
Element base	Neurons, size: 3-100 microns	Transistors, process technology: 45nm
Amount of elements	100 billion neurons	731 million transistors
power usage	15-20 watts in wake mode	130 watt
Number of links per item	tens of thousands of connections to one neuron	Proprietary technology
External interrupt response time	About 1 second	<1 microsecond *
Number of Cores"	Simultaneous execution of up to 5 threads of “meaningful” commands + background threads	four
Self-healing	Partly possible	SC 12mon

* ~ 3000 clock cycles x 4 cores

It looks beautiful, we buy 150 processors, build a server, run it, and ....

Sequentially, in parallel? Perpendicular.

What prevents us from recreating the brain on today's supercomputers?
Modern processors are focused on complex sequential calculations, inside the brain - the signals are transmitted in parallel. This distinction does not allow the use of ordinary computers for effective simulation of brain processes.

Is it possible to find a solution to this problem?
Yes, partially solutions exist, a microchip was developed at the Massachusetts Technical University that can replace a living neuron. At the time of creation, the chip was able to interact with living neurons, however, due to some technical problems, the project did not receive large cash infusions.
One of the most active, at the moment, projects in this direction is the Blue Brain Project, but its goal is to simulate the work of only 10,000 neurons (for which almost 8,000 processors are already involved).

"Ancient" and "new" brain, or the problem of ten percent

Where does consciousness come from? One could be upset if it arose from nothing, fortunately - this is not quite so.
The human brain, unlike the brain of animals, can be divided into two, quite different in structure, areas: "Ancient" and "new" brain.

The “ancient” brain is what is left of our ancestors, its structure is similar to the structure of the animal brain, reflexes, instincts, signal processing centers from the entire periphery (sight, hearing, smell, etc.) are located here, the internal structure of this parts of the brain formed in humans from birth.

The “new” brain - this is what makes us human, it accounts for about 10 billion neurons. Here is fixed our personality, memory, thinking. It happened so from birth this part of the brain is not filled with information.
Because of the percentage of the “new” brain, the myth has arisen that people use their minds only for 10%.


What is this section for? As long as we do not have a disassembler of the “ancient” brain, human DNA (850MB of information) has not yet been deciphered, and from scratch, as we noted, consciousness does not originate.

Reflection

The last of the main problems is connected with the ability of the human brain to create, as necessary, new neurons and connections between them. In the current implementation, when each neuron is considered to be actually one physical processor, this “dynamics” is rather difficult.
Main advantage
Creating an exact copy of our mind would not be very promising, most likely the performance will not allow him to think much faster than us. But one important advantage is still there. Creating a mind, we also design communication interfaces with the outside world; nothing prevents us from connecting the nerves of our newly loaded Masha, Dasha, Sasha, Pasha to powerful computing networks (including the Internet) and classic information storage systems. The advantages of this approach are obvious, it is enough to remember any movies about cyborgs.

Conclusion

Obviously, the x86 architecture, like any of the currently popular ones, is unsuitable for recreating the mind. You can dream up, on the assumption that somewhere in military laboratories more successful experiments are being conducted.

If we exclude all the “secret” data and take into account technological difficulties:
No one bothers to create artificial intelligence in the next 5 years.
No one will create artificial intelligence in the next 5 years.