The future of AI?

[I_am_not_mafia]

The Star Trek: TNG episode with the particle fountain and the exo-comps highlighted an approach that might be useful at some point: software that can rewrite itself (m/l).  They even noted the process frequently went awry as I suspect if such a feature (tee hee) were possible, that would be a frequent result.

The problem is that there will always be something that does not re-write itself. It's like poking yourself in the stomach with your finger and saying that you are a self poking stomach.

I also note that when Data was describing how many operations per second his internals could do, it pretty much to me defined Data as non-living. Any device that is executing instructions as Data seemed to be describing could be imitated by vast numbers of people with pencil and paper doing the same processing.  It might take millions of people centuries and centuries to 'boot up' a Data analog on paper, but the principle would be the same, and the rest of us would NEVER described the resulting cubic miles of pencil marks on paper as 'alive'.

We can simulate neural networks on a computer and the same argument applies. You could theoretically do all those calculations by hand. There is no reason to think that something needs to be analog in order to be alive. The single best defining characteristic of life is that it has a metabolism.