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has 3 million transistors and performs 20 billion integer opera-
tions per second.
Evolution of consciousness in artificial intelligence
Consciousness is a manifestation of the brain’s internal processes.
The generation of consciousness in Homo sapiens coincides
with the evolution and development of neural structures (the
brain) in the biological system. A billion years ago the highest
form of life on Earth was a worm. Let’s consider the ancestral worm
for a moment. Does its rudimentary (neural structure) intelligence
create a form of rudimentary consciousness? If so, then it’s akin to
an intelligence and consciousness that can be created by artificial
neural networks running in today’s supercomputers (see Fig. 2.1).
In reality, while the processing power of supercomputers approaches
that of a worm, this has not yet been accomplished. The reason is that
it is too difficult to program a neural network in a supercomputer
that would use all the computer’s processing power.
The worm is unquestionably alive, but is it self-aware? Is it simply a
cohesive jumble of neurons replaying an ancestral record imprinted
within its primordial neural structure, making it no more than a
16 functional biological automaton?
2.1 Graph showing supercomputer capabilities
Team LRN
Chapter two
