Re:Ray Kurzweil Responds to "Ray Kurzweil does not understan...
by btilly on Friday August 20, 2010 @08:56PM
(#1621992)
Right. And this gets at what I see as Kurzweil's flaw. The emulator you need for his argument to work is the physics engine, a specification of the cell, and the necessary imitation of the surrounding emvironment. This is far, far more information than GENOME. And we know that some of this complexity matters.
That said, the effort of transcribing the 50 MB of genomic information into the final program is simply not a problem. And if we wanted to transcribe a much larger genome, the additional effort for that is again bounded.
This is all, of course, ignoring the excellent point that one would never want to actually do this given how slow this emulator would have to be. If we create AI in the next few decades, I can guarantee that it won't be a physics emulation of a human brain.
For instance http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7092/full/nature0... has an example of RNA-based inheritance that is not in the genome. Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genomic_imprinting shows that what genes you have and what genes you express are two different stories entirely.
That said, the effort of transcribing the 50 MB of genomic information into the final program is simply not a problem. And if we wanted to transcribe a much larger genome, the additional effort for that is again bounded.
This is all, of course, ignoring the excellent point that one would never want to actually do this given how slow this emulator would have to be. If we create AI in the next few decades, I can guarantee that it won't be a physics emulation of a human brain.