QUOTE (Hiroyuki @ Oct 17 2009, 11:38 PM)I don't think it's storage capacity that's the problem, rather how you connect the information together. Learning something isn't about storing it but rather connecting it to the things you already know so that you can follow trains of thought and do reasoning. Machine learning is something that has been researched for at least 50 years but even so I think it's still not much beyond its infancy.
This is most definitely true. A lot of the programming I did during my summer internship involved machine learning, so I got to see first-hand most of the techniques involved, and dang, it's complicated stuff, especially the more general-purpose you go. If you want a machine to tell whether a video feed has a human being in it is very doable. But trying to get that machine to actually act human, to be able to adapt, to change the way it thinks, to change its own motives, is an entirely different problem.
Although, I've gotta say, storage, right now,
is a problem. The issue of capacity should disappear soon enough (capacity doubles every 2 years, which is why we can store so much high-def anime on our computers today
). To model a human brain, we would need many terabytes, maybe even petabytes (I haven't checked recently...) to store all that information. Getting to that point isn't the issue, being able to access the right information quickly enough to make your android/robot/whatever usable is the problem. The only people who have dealt with this problem today are companies like eBay, Google, or the government/military, but they have football-sized super-computers and data-farms to be able to deal with it. We'd need to be able to get something on that scale to function in something brain-sized, and we just don't have the technology yet. There's no doubt in my mind that we'll get there within our lifetimes, but we just don't have it right now.
I think that what we have right now is a fantastic proof-of-concept. We can make machines learn over time, we have/will have the hardware we need to handle the all the computations we'd need, and we've made amazing progress over the past decade in understanding the human brain. I think once we've finished unraveling the human brain (once we can model it), the technology will fall into place.
.......yeah. X_X