U.S. Plan For "Thinking Machines" Repository

An anonymous reader writes "Information scientists organized by the US's NIST say they will create a "concept bank" that programmers can use to build thinking machines that reason about complex problems at the frontiers of knowledge — from advanced manufacturing to biomedicine. The agreement by ontologists — experts in word meanings and in using appropriate words to build actionable machine commands — outlines the critical functions of the Open Ontology Repository (OOR). More on the summit that produced the agreement here."

Comments

Re:Every few years the same thing.

[mrbluze]

Brains are like blank slates.

This is false and this is why, even if you 'simulate' cells in the brain, you still don't end up with a brain. The subtlety of brain development before birth is far from being adequately understood.

Unless you want to say that there is some mystical element to brains, there is nothing precluding the eventual design and building of 'sentient' computers, surely?

The only thing precluding it is ethics. I dare you to propose to have thousands upon thousands of mothers give you their healthy foetuses at varying stages of development so that you can kill and analyze them.