Hi Allen, Thank you for your insights. Have you looked at using living cells in computer design and the implications for AI? I’d like to hear your thoughts on this. Maybe you could write a guest blog posting.

Kurzweil argues that human intelligence is the result of processes in the brain, that nothing going on within the brain is a non-physical process, that all physical processes are in principle describable in words of natural language, and that the most important implication of the Church Turing Thesis boils down to the pregnant proposition that digital computers can execute programs that in principle precisely model any conceivable description of any physical process. Hence digital computers can model any and all describable processes of the human brain.

With the minor quibble of the essential addition of a True RND generator, Kurzweil’s logical construction seems irrefutable. It’s a fair question to ask whether any conceivable scheme for a computing device (quantum, analogue, magnetic interferometer, etc,) can do anything a Turing Machine cannot do. Seems doubtful. Choice of the particular type of computing device seems to come down to power requirements, costs, and speed. Sub-optimum silicon semi-conductor binary bit microchips will soon be cheap enough, efficient enough, and fast enough to implement Kurzweil’s AI Singularity. As I can understand the issue, the indeterminate state “quantum” computer element brings only a different scheme of True RND to the machine. Adding a fast True RND bit generator (a technology well-developed several decades ago) to a fast Turing Machine, would seem to transform it into a “quantum” computer. We don’t need to develop and perfect radically new circuit elements to make self-learning robots.

But we do need to wait for a couple more generations of silicon wafer micro-chips before investing in several billion man-hours of AI code.