(November 30, 2012 at 8:17 pm)genkaus Wrote: As long as the machine follows the programming laid down by the programmer, I agree, it cannot be considered intelligent or sentient. But, if a machine is created with the capacity to override and write its own programs, then yes, it would become intelligent and sentient and the extent to which it can write its own programs would reflect the level of sentience it has.
For example, consider the example of a diagnostic machine which is fed the names of all known diseases, their symptoms and treatments into it. Now, if the machine becomes capable of adding new entries or reclassifying the previous ones then it is displaying intelligence or sentience.
I think such a program has the capacity to perform the task of medical diagnosis more thoroughly and accurately than any human, and may well be able to access all the latest most relevant statistical data by way of the cloud. So in that sense I would say it is highly intelligent and potentially to a degree exceeding our own for the task for which it has been programmed. It isn't clear to me how its capacity to update and integrate new data, though highly intelligent, would ever amount to sentience.
I suspect I'm more skeptical because I play no computer games and so don't spend much time in virtual environments. Of course, this is a virtual environment but I'm not the only human here .. or am I?
hock:
