CNN interviews Nick Bostrom

Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and member of the Board of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, said that AI-inspired systems were already integral to many everyday technologies such as internet search engines, bank software for processing transactions and in medical diagnosis. But Bostrom said that traditional “top-down” approaches to AI, in which programmers coded machined to cope with specific situations, were being supplemented by “bottom-up” systems inspired by enhanced understanding of the neural networks of the brain, leading to more subtle forms of AI.

Link to the note
CNN on the Future Summit

“The more we discover how the human brain achieves intelligence the more we’ll be able to use the same computational architecture and logarithms in computers,” said Bostrom. “At the extreme of the bottom up level you would have ‘uploading,’ which is the idea of scanning a particular brain in sufficient detail that you can then replicate its neural machinery.” Inventor and science writer Ray Kurzweil believes the development of artificial superintelligence will herald a “singularity,” in which human cognitive abilities are enhanced by brain implants. Bostrom is confident that technological advances coupled with a growing understanding of the workings of the human brain could enable machines to exceed human brain power within a couple of decades.