Suicides roil Chinese tech giant

Suicides roil Chinese tech giant
Psychologists and Buddhist monks have come to console workers. There is a suicide hotline, piped-in music and a stress-release center where workers are invited to hit a punching bag with a picture of their supervisor.

Read more on Seattle Times

Suicides roil Chinese company that makes iPhones

Suicides roil Chinese company that makes iPhones
Psychologists and Buddhist monks have come to console workers. There is a suicide hotline, piped-in music and a stress-release center where workers are invited to hit a punching bag with a picture of their supervisor.

Read more on Denver Post

Suicides roil factory in China

Suicides roil factory in China
Nine workers at a computer component maker have killed themselves this year. Psychologists and monks have been called in; there are now punching bags. Experts cite an expectation gap of young workers. Psychologists and Buddhist monks have come to console workers. There is a suicide hotline, piped-in music and a stress-release center where workers are invited to hit a punching bag with a picture …

Read more on Los Angeles Times

Artificial Intelligence: Robots That Think Like Humans?

Within the next few decades having a robot psychologist will become popular predicts futurist James Canton (2007). Computers will be capable of making diagnoses of mental problems and issues of well­being. Others have predicted that robots will eventually be better at this than trained psychologists.

Canton is probably correct that computers will be able to diagnose many psychological problems, and even prescribe courses of treatment and medication. They will probably assume a certain segment of the work of psychologists. However they will not assume it all. How many people will want to sit in front of a machine for fifty minutes pouring their heart out? And how might that same machine detect the depths of the human psyche?

My conviction is that it simply will not be able to, because the robot shrink will be intelligent, but not conscious; at least not in the foreseeable future. Here lies the key distinction that I wish to make, and the one that many thinkers in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field crucially fail to recognise.

It is one thing to say that computers are like brains, but are brains like computers?

Much of modern cognitive science is dominated by the computer metaphor. Brains can calculate and simulate and modulate. But just how much like a human mind is a computer? Could a computer ever really be said to be intelligent in the way that a person is? Could we ever empathise with such a “mind”? And if not, does it really matter?

The entire field of artificial intelligence is centered on this goal, this belief. Many, like futurists Ray Kurzweil, James Canton, and James Martin are convinced that not only will computers be intelligent like humans, they will soon be a hell of a lot more intelligent, including in non-human-like ways. The moment when computers surpass human intelligence and become the smartest thing on the planet is what Kurzweil calls “the Singularity”. If it occurs, it will be a defining moment in ‘evolution’ on this planet.

Artificial intelligence is not something to be dismissed lightly, simply because it seems incredible. The limits of computing technology are unknown, but undoubtedly vast, perhaps incomprehensible. AI optimist Ray Kuzweil points out the following staggering comparison between the human brain and an equivalent sized computer.

..an optimally organized 2.2-pound computer using reversible logic gates has about 10-25 atoms and can store about 10-27 bits. Just considering electromagnetic interactions between the particles, there are at least 10­15 state changes per bit per second that can be harnessed for computation, resulting in about 10-42 calculations per second in the ultimate “cold” 2.2-pound computer. This is about 10-16 times more powerful than all biological brains today. If we allow our ultimate computer to get hot, we can increase this further by as much as 10-8­fold. And we obviously won’t restrict our computational resources to one kilogram of matter but will ultimately deploy a significant fraction of the matter and energy on the Earth and in the solar system and then spread out from there (Kurzweil 2005 p 434).

 

And just in case you are not feeling threatened, futurist James Martin believes that the intelligence of computers will barely resemble that of humans. And they will be vastly more intelligent. He writes:

…the true computer revolution is yet to come – with ubiquitous censors, nanotechnology, global data warehouses and totally pervasive access to networks of extreme bandwidth. The main reason the true computer revolution is ahead of us is that machines will become intelligent. …Computers can be immensely more powerful than the human brain because their circuits are millions of times faster than the neurons and axons of the brain, and they can be designed to perform specific types of “thought” with great efficiency. Such computing will become an infrastructure that is everywhere, like the air we breathe, affecting almost every activity of humankind.” (Martin 2007: 207).

Martin’s conclusion that computers will be everywhere is a logical extrapolation drawn from current trends in computing. There is undoubtedly strong demand from the general populace, small businesses, corporations, education, institutions and governments to use them, so he is very likely correct.

Yet this does not change the fact that many of the arguments of AI proponents are deeply flawed. Consciousness and intelligence are fundamentally different concepts, as I shall argue in the second part of this article.

 

References

Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. Penguin 2005

James Canton, The Extreme Future. Plume, 2007

James Martin, The Meaning of the Twenty-first Century. Riverhead 2007

 

You can read the second part of this article, and comment on it, on Dr. Marcus T. Anthony’s blog about the future, www.22cplusblogspot.com .

Human Brain And Memory Process

The memory process in the human brain is very complex. No computer has come close to the capacity of the human brain as of yet. However, it is only a matter of time before computers will have overcome the human brain’s power with the fusion of nanotechnology and biotech resources, expected within the next 20-30 years. Scientists have been discovering and uncovering each part of the human memory system in order to help better understand how we encode our memories, and retrieve them as well. Understanding these memory processes can help parents to improve the prospect of a higher education for their children early in life, and help people improve the quality of their memory and recollection processes.

You can think of the process of storing memories in your mind to be similar to that of a computer that utilizes RAM (Random Access Memory) for the temporary storage of information before being placed in long-term storage on the hard drive. This temporary storage, or working memory, depends on a different network of brain structures than long term memories do. Psychologists refer to storing memories as an encoding process–a procedure for transforming something a person sees hears, thinks, or feels into a memory. Scientists have determined there are different methods in how we lay down our memories.

Memory functions in the brain in a very complicated fashion. To date, scientists are unable to design computers that can compete with the human brain. But, it is promising in the next two or three decades that scientists may be able to devise advanced computers with the help of nanotechnology, cybernetics and biotech resources. Scientists and researchers have put their wise efforts to discover and uncover all the elements of the human memory system in order to get a better understanding of its encoding and retrieving processes. These understandings are crucially important for improving the quality of an individual’s memory and recollection process.

Our thought, senses, memory and actions all influence distinct sets of nerve cells and chemicals within our brain. The hippocampus, the amygdale and close areas of temporal lobe are associated to the cortex with the help of complex nerve cells. This actually forms the fundamental structure of our memory system. When a nerve cell in the brain gets activated, a low-charged electrical potential is sent to the axon. This helps in releasing brain chemicals or neurotransmitters, which attain across the synaptic gaps between nerve cells and bolt onto the corresponding receptors. The nerve cells that obtain the brain chemicals then send the signal along to other relevant nerve cells. This happens like a relay race.

When the same signals are received repeatedly, the synaptic changes occur more efficiently contributing to the physical changes among synaptic connections. This is how the human brain stores memory on a long term basis. Scientists and researchers assume that the changes in particular synaptic patterns in folds and ridges of human brain contribute to memory encoding for lengthy time span. In fact, convoying electrochemical associations constituted between different cells in human brain help storing memory including thoughts, skills, knowledge and experiences.

There are debates on the distribution of memory over the human brain. While some scientists assume that human brain constitutes memory in a particular region within the brain structure, some others claim that human brain does not localize memory within a particular territory, that is, memory is all over distributed through out the brain structure. Scientists claim that the cell functions corresponding to learning and memory process are indistinguishable at the biological level. In fact, proof has been already established in the support of the strong correlation between learning process and memory system. It is also assumed that to execute the learning process, the human brain employs multiple memory systems, each of which is engaged to encode different sorts of memory functions.

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