I had a conversation with someone who was so wowed by the AI progress so far (mainly Musks’ AI on YouTube) that he told me we’re going to have a full on replicant on our hands in the near future. As in, maybe we could have a Jetsons style robot maid in 5 years. Or have C3POs walking around. He was convinced, but I wasn’t. This is because you can put anything on YouTube after it’s been edited in Premiere, but also that human brains are so complicated.

The numbers get out of hand really quick for brains. The number of synapses in one human brain is equal to the number of stars in 5000 Milky Way’s. And then every synapse has something on the order of 100,000 molecular switches in it. And these 100,000 switches, protein molecules in every synapse, communicate a lot with one another, they interact a lot. And then that’s in one synapse, and then the, the human has something between 10 to the 14th, and 10, to the 15th synapses. Now, okay, so there’s a lot of complexity. And then to make matters worse, it is intricately arranged in very tight quarters. So the synapse again, there’s a billion of them per microliter of brain volume in a human. remember that each one of those synapses has somewhere between 10 and 100,000, switches in it. 

Why don’t we understand the brain?

I said that unless AI can understand culture, follow directions non-literally, laugh at a joke it hasn’t heard before, and get through an obstacle course it hasn’t seen or been programmed specifically for, and know when enough is enough, then we have created something human-like.

Until then, I’m waiting for the brain-computer amalgamation that would let me do my job while I’m working out.