Will AI ever = conciousness or sentience?

[The Grand Nudger]

On another website I visit it seems most people think our machines will be joining us as sentient beings in their own right any day now. I'd like to poll our larger group to find out what is the prevailing opinion here.

Can machines even be said to think? What counts as thinking? If the execution of decision trees is thinking then indeed they already do 'think'. A program that can diagnose diseases strikes me as very intelligent, but its intelligence of course reflects that of its programmer.

I'm not convinced that machines are or ever will be up to all the tasks me might describe as thinking, but I'll concede that at least some 'thinking' tasks can be accomplished by machines.

Even so, is there any reason to think a program will ever experience subjective states or become self aware or have an identity crisis or be said to exhibit wisdom that does not directly reflect that of its programmer? I see that as a very different question than asking whether a machine could be programmed in such a way as to fool us into thinking these things are going on. I'm skeptical to the point of finding the idea aburd.

I can't make an air tight argument against the possibility but I don't believe it is or ever will be possible. What do you think?

Well, I think that with a couple tiny tweaks to -your- programming the idea will seem a hell of alot less absurd.

- Do you exhibit any wisdom that does not directly reflect your programmer? More aptly, your various programmers. Is there some part of your thought process that you feel arose all on it's own, without instruction or structure from your genetics or your environment? These things could be called your programmers, even if you're not accustomed to considering them as such. Of course, we could consider ourselves as another programmer in that group (but this wouldn't matter...because our machines are already capable of altering their own code).

- Is there any "fooling us into thinking that these things are going on"- going on? Is there anything other than the effect which we refer to when we consider something to be intelligent, to be thinking? Are we just tricking each other and ourselves when we "think"?

I think that your skepticism has been subverted by anthropic bias. Human thought doesn't have a programmer, machines would have to "trick" us.

Now, for what I think about this. Currently, it would take a very large machine (packed into a very small space) and an extremely robust software suite to accomplish this. We have a head-start on the order of 3.5 billion years (and the field testing, QA, and Tech departments were downright murderous.....)....but look how quickly our machines have been able to play catch up - and yes..even overtake us. We do seem to be trending towards denser, smaller hardware (which allows us to process more data, more quickly)....and our ability to create software with things like pattern recognition ( one of the keys to the ability to "learn") does seem to be improving. Something I would wonder, about AI (as I see it as a definite possibility) is what strange human quirks we would be programming into it (even unintentionally) as it's programmers...as our environment and genetics programmed ticks into us.