Bob Blum

Robert L. Blum, MD, PhD

The Story of Ralph

In 2007 Bruce Klein, Founding Architect of Singularity University, sent out a

question to the artificial intelligensia: When Will AI Surpass Human-Level Intelligence?

This was my quick (semiserious) reply.

Everyone’s first take on this question must be"when will a computer first
be able to pass the Turing test?" My answer, along with most folks, is 2030 to 2050.
(Note: as of July 2009 I pulled in my prediction to 2020- 2030. See Elbot.)

Surely by then, or well before, we'll have natural language programs that can

fake enough discourse understanding, knowledge of current events and human affairs, and common sense to slip by the judges. This is penny ante stuff - parlor games.

More interesting to me is the "surpass" part. Just to stir up the natives,

here's a little story for you. It's about RALPH, a secret program, designed
for internal corporate use at INTEL, just developed in 2040.

RALPH's purpose is to autonomously design INTEL's next generation chip.
That chip will leap ahead of Moore's Law, will replace RALPH's own cpu, and
will once-and-for-all crush that nettlesome competitor AMD.

CHIP DESIGN: RALPH thoroughly understands the detailed features, limitations, and

manufacture of Intel's current chip the Dodecium40, since its precursor helped design it.

However, now RALPH is on its own. Unaided it combs the world's literature researching design candidates and manufacturability.

Here's a few picoseconds of its nightly deliberations. At 0357 GMT it's trying to crack the

loss of quantum coherence problem that plagued the Dodecium40 design team and limited the number of bits in its registers, allowing AMD to stay competitive. Combing the literature for solutions, it finds a promising reference in the Bulgarian Journal of Quantum Computing.

To understand this article, it brings itself up to date on all the precursor literature, and in so doing, sees the solution that was sought after but not actually achieved by the Bulgarian research team.

But will this theoretical insight actually work when the nanotubes hit the road? At Intel's automated research facilities at McMurdo Sound (easy cryo) and in GEO (no funky gravity probs), it robotically performs feasibility studies that are highly promising. On this basis, it decides to go ahead with a full bore design effort for a new Dodecium41chip, the lynch pin of which is a new theory of quantum coherence. Top that, AMD!

MANUFACTURABILITY Minor problem: the cost of the fab for the new chip will exceed the GDP of the G13 nations. Corollary subproblem: raise the financing for the new fab. At 0357…01 RALPH investigates several hundred novel vc, equity, and debt financing possibilities. Among the leading candidates are 1) take a controlling position in GERON International which, RALPH predicts, will announce its immortality drug within the next six months and 2) sell ASTEROID bonds, which will give the owners all mineral rights (including carbonaceous chondrites) to the asteroid belt and 3) gamble on the financial ideas that RALPH itself will devise once it is augmented with the Dodecium41.

BRAIN-MIND Augmentation Simulation The last financial option requires a detailed simulation and prediction by RALPH of its own ingenuity post augmentation by the new chip. After all, the new chip is disruptive technology. RALPH has a thorough understanding of its current hardware and software configuration. For years its precursors have been able to

autodiagnose and fix most glitches, large and small, in real-time. But predicting its own IQ (and making a financial bet on it post-upgrade; that is a toughie. It takes a full 3 nanoseconds during which 83% of its Bose-Einstein condensate heat sinks are sucking away infrared at full bore.

Anyway, you get the idea. REAL super AI - not nickel and dime Turing test stuff,
imitating mall rats for brain-dead human entertainment.

Copyleft 2007 Bob Blum (copy this or else!)