The Human Brain: The Original General Intelligence

The human brain and what it is capable of are topics on this episode of The AI Minute. For more on Artificial Intelligence: https://voicesinai.com https://gigaom.com https://byronreese.com https://amzn.to/2vgENbn... Transcript: The human brain is the only real general intelligence we know of in the universe. What is your brain capable of? Well, of course, it’s a myth that we “only use 10% of our brain.” You use pretty much all of your brain. Having said that, some people are able to do astonishing things with their brains. Three examples will suffice: 1. A man named Kim Peek could read 10,000 words a minute by reading two pages at once, one page with one eye and the other page with the other eye. 2. Mathematician named Bill Tutte cracked the German Lorenz code with just a pen and a stack of paper. He had never seen the machine, but he was able to crack the code when the Germans accidentally transmitted the same message twice. 3. And my favorite. In 1939 George Dantzig, a graduate student at UC Berkeley showed up late for class. The professor had written two famous unsolved statistic problems on the chalkboard. Seeing the problems, Dantzig assumed they were that week’s homework, so he copied them down and, you can probably guess, he solved them. Later he remarked that the problems “seemed to be a little harder than usual.” The point of all of this is that we can, in theory, be dramatically smarter than we currently are. Imagine if we identified the physical factors that made Stephen Hawking’s brain the superb instrument that it is. And further imagine if we learned how to instantiate that within a machine. http://bit.ly/2Mb28X6 gigaom May 27, 2019 at 03:15PM