Ask an Artificial Intelligentsia

[I_am_not_mafia]

PhD and MSc in Artificial Intelligence, BSc in Computer Science. One post-doc and several years experience in R&D working in industry with A.I. of all flavours.

There's a lot of crap out there about A.I, mainly from people pretending to research it and wanting to get funding of some sorts. Futurologists can also talk a lot of crap as well.

Get a grounded opinion from someone who works at the coal face of A.I.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

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....


Boru

[I_am_not_mafia]

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.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Actually, I meant indistinguishable in the sense of interactions (body aside), such as an artificial intelligence able to pass the Turing test 100% of the time.  For instance, could I sit down at my monitor and have a conversation about, say, Milton, and be unable to tell if I were speaking with a flesh-and-blood or an A.I?

Boru

[ignoramus]

Hi matey.
Have you seen "Ex Machina"
Very interesting movie...

What is "blue book"?

[Longhorn]

What did you think if the movie AI, if you've seen it?

[Napoléon]

What did you think of the movie "Her", if you've seen it?

[Exian]

Roko's Basilisk... Have you donated all you can? 0_o

[Longhorn]

What did you think of the movie "Her", if you've seen it?

11/10 best love story ever
well, beats twilight

[Napoléon]

11/10 best love story ever
well, beats twilight

On a serious level, I wasn't expecting the film to be as good as it was. I think it gave a perspective on AI that was very unique. As someone who's dealt with actual AI and knows it a lot better than I do I wonder what IANM thinks about the possibility of having a romance with your operating system lol.