G&T: in two very different directions….
Weeks ago, hlin told us about the practice of foot-binding.
This morning I came across this image of Rancho boots that reminded me instantly of this old practice:
Although it has been reported that
“Special Shoes For Bound-feet Women Now A Thing Of The Past, seems…
not so.
Also turning up in this morning’s Times was a discussion about the difficulties of creating artificial intelligence, which ends
although it eventually may be possible to design sophisticated computing devices that imitate what we do, the capability to make such a device is already here. All you need is a fertile man and woman with the resources to nurture their child to adulthood. With luck, by 2030 you’ll have a full-grown, college-educated, walking petabyte. A drawback is that it may be difficult to get this computing device to do what you ask.
So tell me: why build an artificial brain? Is it in order to get something more malleable or capable than what we already have?
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Unlike what Hollywood would like us to believe, I think the main aim of building an artificial brain (at least in academic research) is to help understand the complexities underlying brain function: how individual neurons connected through neural networks leads to learning, memory formation, decision making, etc. These models, although simplistic when compared to the actual brain, have the power to help us understand the fundamental nature of neural connections and how they operate.