kennyc wrote:

home_ wrote:

DavidMcC wrote:

home_ wrote:...

If Moore's law slows down, it just means that it won't happen in 2045 but later. We'd also need a very good understanding of how brain works to do this kind of replacement. At this point, we're probably decades away from that. But some future generations may be able to do it.

I've got news for you, home_ - Moore's law has already stopped! There was a thread about it recently. Perhaps you missed it.

Which thread? I know that we've hit clock limit, but new processors are more and more parallel,.. Number of computations per second is still going up, unless I missed something.

Yes and new fabrication and implementation techniques yet to be commercialized. David is clueless about computer technology. The only ultimate limit is the Planck limit.

Only for someone who knows SFA about semiconductor switching and IC technology. At a certain packing density the heat of switching melts the circuit, even though the switching speed is improving. You need to study more.

A couple of links:

http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1323507

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph250/kumar1/

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... 13570.html

http://www.theconnectivist.com/2013/10/ ... computing/

Now back to the topic at hand....

Kenny's second link

Practical aspects

Power consumption and speed are limited fundamentally by the devices, but practically by the electrical parasites, interconnects and chip architecture. This is the reason for the clock speed to have saturated at about 3GHz for today's processors. All alternative ideas, like optical interconnects and more would see their limit in the domain conversion, which is limited by thermodynamics discussed here. The "2" in kBT ln2 can be made higher to, say, m, but that only pushes the limits by a factor of ln(m)/ln2. [6-7]

With optical interconnects, size is a problem. You can't miniaturise them the way you can with purely electronic connections.
The egg's on you.

As I said David knows fuck-all about computers, electronics, physics or just about any other topic you care to name. He's best ignored which is where he now returns.

kennyc wrote:As I said David knows fuck-all about computers, electronics, physics or just about any other topic you care to name. He's best ignored which is where he now returns.

I notice the complete lack of a reply to the point he and that others have raised.

There have been almost no performance improvements in processors for a decade now. Parallelism doesn't help except for certain types of computation. The predictions of people like Kurzweil relied on Moore's law continuing until at least 2025. But in practice it had run out of steam in by 2005. That 20 years of Moores Law-based performance improvements that we will never see has made all their predictions nonsensical. That is a 10,000-fold performance increase that they were looking forward to but won't get.

You talk about the Planck limit but that's the limit for any future technology, however advanced. Maybe we will hit that limit in a thousand years, maybe never. The limits for silicon transistors are way, way below that and we are rapidly reaching them.

Yeah, well, you apparently don't read very well then. and since you too are oh-so extremely knowledgeably on the topic I'll suggest the same treatment of your posts.

as far as the AI front:

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/artificial-int ... es-1479887

And don't forget to vote for the Transhumanist Party Candidate for president!

http://www.transhumanistparty.org/

Mis-reading the sub-heading for the thread, reminded me of seeing a photograph of Charisma Carpenter's arse, and having decidedly unclean thoughts. Would looking for it on the internet again count as digital immorality?

With a finger like your avatar, yes.

kennyc wrote:Yeah, well, you apparently don't read very well then. and since you too are oh-so extremely knowledgeably on the topic I'll suggest the same treatment of your posts.

Why do you think I'm not knowledgeable on the subject?

I admit I'm not a specialist in semiconductor process technology but an electronic engineering degree and a day job designing digital hardware counts for something, I think. What's your expertise here?

Chrisw wrote:

kennyc wrote:Yeah, well, you apparently don't read very well then. and since you too are oh-so extremely knowledgeably on the topic I'll suggest the same treatment of your posts.

Why do you think I'm not knowledgeable on the subject?

I admit I'm not a specialist in semiconductor process technology but an electronic engineering degree and a day job designing digital hardware counts for something, I think. What's your expertise here?

Yeah, that's quite obvious from your posts.

kennyc wrote:

Chrisw wrote:

kennyc wrote:Yeah, well, you apparently don't read very well then. and since you too are oh-so extremely knowledgeably on the topic I'll suggest the same treatment of your posts.

Why do you think I'm not knowledgeable on the subject?

I admit I'm not a specialist in semiconductor process technology but an electronic engineering degree and a day job designing digital hardware counts for something, I think. What's your expertise here?

Yeah, that's quite obvious from your posts.

If I was inventing a fantasy occupation for myself I think I'd pick something more glamorous.

You don't know enough to judge how much I know. All you are doing is Googling for stuff that appears to support what you want to believe. Including a (barely literate) student paper, FFS.

Do you have any technical background at all? Do you even write software?

Noam Chomsky says The Singularity is Science Fiction.

Would a transhuman upload scenario render the concept of gender meaningless?

THWOTH wrote:Would a transhuman upload scenario render the concept of gender meaningless?

Certainly Could. One question I've raised in my writings is How would evolution proceed without death? Would there have to be some sort of means of procreating and death in order to evolve or would 'life' just become static and unchanging?

What part would emotion play in the experience of an uploaded transhuman?

THWOTH wrote:What part would emotion play in the experience of an uploaded transhuman?

You might also ask whether uploaded transhumans would either have learning difficulties or a very large head!