TED Community » Shantanu Rai

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About Me

Location:
India, New Delhi
Gender:
Male
Areas of expertise:
Machines, Simulation, Process Control, CAD/CAM/CAE, PLM
I am:
Concerned citizen, Engineer, Entrepreneur, Parent, World traveler
Languages:
English
Universities:
Roorkee
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More About Me

I'm passionate about

Science & Technology and the impact it can have on improving society, quality of life and progress of man-kind.

An idea worth spreading

Science education is critical to reducing poverty and having a broader innovation across this generation.

Comments

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  • A reply on Conversation: Are we on the brink of creating a human-like digital mind?

    Mar 23 2013: What you described is a fascinating experience. I also tend to agree with your assertion that self-awareness does not require massive computing power.

    Rather it comers at a critical threshold of 'non-linearity'.
    Neural-net based programs ( and I presume you may have used something similar) tend to show amazing personality traits as you keep on adding layers of neurons.

    So as we keep adding layers into a neural net, we shall see signs of human like intelligence.

    On a slightly lighter vein, great minds probably have a few additional layers of the 'grey matter' and that makes all the difference.
  • +2

    A comment on Conversation: Are we on the brink of creating a human-like digital mind?

    Mar 21 2013: I am reminded of a few things from the movie industry..the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic "Rise of Machines" and Also the Matrix trilogy.
    Rise of the Machines starts from the time SkyNet becomes "Self Aware".. likewise the Matrix is a much evolved version of the Self aware SkyNet.
    Flipping over, there are number of articles today that mention that the inflexion point when the total number of connect sensors/transistors/computers in the world would exceed the human brain, is not too far into the future.

    So a slightly scary thought is whether the Internet as we know of will become "Self Aware" at some point in the future ? If so, what could be its moral compass ?

    Hence, in my view, the ability of any system to reproduce itself is the first milestone of non-linearity. Similar to bacteria and other single cellular animals.

    The second milestone of non-linearity is the system becomes "Self Aware" a bit like tiny insects who interact to the surroundings.

    Similarly, the ultimate milestone is the ability of a system to abstract itself and reproduce physically and also intellectually, i.e. convince another system to behave like it. To me it appears another milestone of non-linearity.

    The fact that a lot of this has echos of philosophy is a question for another debate.

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