Machine Intelligence and Human Intelligence

There has been a stellar rise in computational power since 2006 in part thanks to GPUs, yet today, we are as an intelligent species essentially singular. There are of course some other brainy species, like chimpanzees, dolphins, crows and octopuses, but if anything they only emphasize our unique position on Earth -- as animals richly gifted with self-awareness, language, abstract thought, art, mathematical capability, science, technology and so on. Many of us have staked our entire self-concept on the idea that to be human is to have a mind, and that minds are the unique province of humans. For those of us who are not religious, this could be interpreted as the last bastion of dualism. Our economic, legal and ethical systems are also implicitly built around this idea. Now, we're well along the road to really understanding the fundamental principles of how a mind can be built, and Moore's Law will put brain-scale computing within reach this decade. (We need to put some asterisks next to Moore's Law, since we are already running up against certain limits in computational scale using our present-day approaches, but I'll stand behind the broader statement.) In this talk I will discuss the relationships between engineered neurally inspired systems and brains today, between humans and machines tomorrow, and how these relationships will alter user interfaces, software and technology.