Artificial Intelligence at Human Level by 2029?

Gerard Boyers writes "Some members of the US National Academy of Engineering have predicted that Artificial Intelligence will reach the level of humans in around 20 years. Ray Kurzweil leads the charge: 'We will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029. We're already a human machine civilization, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons.' Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers, and a gentleman we've discussed previously. He was chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter."

Comments

How pathetic

[JulianConrad]

It's pretty clear now that the rate of progress has leveled off and fallen well short of the flying cars, space colonization, nanotech assemblers and friendly AI fantasy-future. Physicist Jonathan Huebner has gathered empirical evidence (PDF) showing that we're pretty much fucked for new, practical technological ideas already, and that includes AI. I'd respect Kurzweil more if he'd stop making an ass of himself with his sci-fi stuff, go back to his lab and work on something useful.

Re:Oblig.

[ILuvRamen]

well as a programmer for 2 years and someone who just knows what he's talking about, computers and human brains will not be equal anytime remotely soon. They work in the most basic way completely differently from each other. We can look at a picture and say it's Steve Jobs in a sombraro and a million computers couldn't figure that out in years of facial recognition and object comparison. And yet it'd take a room full of humans with pencils and paper to figure out certain math operations that computers can do in under a second. Computers are linear and human brains and dynamic and relational. Computers can't do hardly anything open ended and we can't do linear stuff very well. And yes you can write code for relational database access but it doesn't come close and the IO time on any storage media can't come close to a human brain.