>Our discovery is that every region of the neocortex learns 3D models of objects much like a CAD program.
Citation needed. If this was the case, certainly we'd have some experiments that show this? Especially since every part of the neocortex is supposed to be doing it.<p>Now if we can make artificial neural networks that work with 3D data, learning such things as 3D data to value, 3D data to 3D data mappings that would be damn useful. IE, estimating how much it would cost to make something from a CAD model or how aerodynamic a thing is without running costly CFD.<p>I'd also argue that we don't need 'truly intelligent machines' to "build structures, mine resources, and independently solve complex problems"<p>Ants and termites are capable of doing similar tasks and I'm doubtful the author considers them 'truly intelligent'.<p>>it should be possible to design intelligent machines that sense and act at the molecular scale.
>These machines would think about protein folding and gene expression in the same way you and I think about computers and staplers.
>They could think and act a million times as fast as a human.
So if the author means in simulated environments, we are quite slow at simulating molecules. For molecular simulation, we need something like femtosecond(10^-15 s) time steps whereas each time step is on the order of milliseconds. We are trillions of times slower than realtime. This is for completely classical systems, if we take into account quantum effects, it's much longer. Oh and our simulation methods for such things are terrible. Intelligence would help here, but it's not going to be millions of times faster than a human.<p>Now if they mean videoing what's happening with a microscope and learning from that, well the problem is we don't have a perfect microscope for seeing such things at the nanoscale. So in order to figure out what's going on we have to get creative and make tests for each thing we're trying to analyze.<p>Now if the author means nanorobots inside cells doing learning and what not, just having such machines would be useful in and of itself. Heck if we could make such things, we wouldn't need to worry about problems such as gene expression or protein folding because we'd be able to make our own damn proteins or our own damn cells for that matter. Even with drexlerian tech doing this sort of machine learning at this scale is pretty ridiculous. Current nanobot designs require something on the order of kilobytes of memory[1]. In addition, gene expression, protein synthesis and folding are slow processes. Average protein synthesis time for eukaryotes is 2 minutes[1](eons as far as simulating these things is concerned!). So getting this data can't happen much faster than a human can think.<p>[0]<a href="http://people.umass.edu/bioch623/623/Second.Section/7.%20CoT.Web.2.08.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://people.umass.edu/bioch623/623/Second.Section/7.%20CoT...</a>
[1]<a href="http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/Microbivores.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/Microbivores.htm</a>