Gigaom AI Minute – July 27

Transcript

The human brain is the only real general intelligence we know of in the universe. What is your brain capable of? Well, of course, it's a myth that we only use 10% of our brain. You use pretty much all of your brain. That being said, some people are able to do astonishing things with their brains. Three examples will suffice:

One, a man named Kim Peek could read 10,000 words per minute by reading two pages at once, one page with one eye and the other page with the other eye.

Two, mathematician Bill Tutte cracked the German Lorenz code with just a pen and a stack of paper. He had never even seen the machine, but was able to crack the code when the Germans accidentally transmitted the same message two times.

Three, in 1939 George Dantzig, a graduate student at UC Berkeley showed up late for class. The professor had written two famous unsolved statistic problems on the chalkboard. Seeing the problems, Dantzig assumed they were that week's homework assignment, so he copied them down and, as you have probably guessed it, he solved them. Later he remarked that the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual."

The point to all of this is that we can, in theory, be dramatically smarter than we currently are. Imagine if we identified the physical factors that made Stephen Hawking brain the superb instrument that it is. And imagine if we learned how to instantiate that in a machine.