RE: Ask an Artificial Intelligentsia
May 23, 2015 at 7:00 am
(This post was last modified: May 23, 2015 at 7:06 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
(May 23, 2015 at 6:42 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote: Do you expect we'll ever reach the point where artificial intelligence is indistinguishable from the other sort? If so, when? See, I've got this positronic brain all ready to go....
If we had all the processing power we need, an artificial organism still won't be human because it will interact with the world in a completely different way because it will have a different body and different evolutionary history. In the same way that even a really intelligent animal will have different instincts, drives and ways of interpreting its senses. People still question whether animals have consciousness and emotions (they do).
But if you take a more general definition of intelligence then sure there's absolutely no reason to think that it can't be done given adequate processing power and the engineering skills to create a body. There's no reason to think that there's any kind of ghost in the machine. The real limitation though is available processing power. The computational power of the brain is staggering and it is extremely energy efficient compared to our silicon computers and it is several orders of magnitude more parallel in ways that we cannot yet hope to achieve. Even a single neuron has more processing power than a conventional artificial neural network of today.
To reach the point where we can create our own artificial brains we will need an entirely new way of processing (organic computers? quantum computers?). We will also need to be able to understand not only how brains work but also understand why they work the way they do. And we'll also have to evolve them some way rather than design them. That will require orders of magnitude more processing power.
Moore's law certainly won't continue long enough for that to happen despite what some media-scientists have claimed in the past. And the world might run out of natural resources before we can make that technological leap. So to answer your question, it depends on whether civilisation collapses before we manage it.
