Won't it be getting close to the Flood for those poor folks?
Maybe we could bundle our tele-evangelists into a spaceship and send them there to spread salvation. The horrors of Earth must not be repeated elsewhere.
The questions that matter are functional, not philosophical. And those are relatively easy questions.
If the questions that matter are entirely functional, then strong AI is no big deal. You can create machines that can move faster than humans, you can create machines that can add faster than humans. Move along, nothing to see here. If you're talking about machines `being intelligent', you have to address Searle's concern.
I think it is important not to conflate the fact that we don't understand something with the idea that it will be difficult once figured out or discovered as a consequence of some fortuitous sequence of events. That's been shown again and again not to be the case. It *may* be so, but it is by no means certain to be so, and for that matter, it isn't indicated by the complexity of the brain's hardware. The brain is considerably more formidable as a mass of immensely complex moderated connectivity than it is as a collection of cellular-level mystery machines, and a good deal of the complexity at the cellular level is almost certainly irrelevant to the task of thought -- keeping the cell alive is probably in no way related to non-pathological mental operation, yet there's a lot of hardware and systems involved in the task.
In still other news, an exception to this process was found to occur in the neuronal wiring of ID proponents, where connections corresponding to increase in overall intelligence of the network were found to be strongly selected against.
Slashdot Mirror
shred -f -r ~/hillary/
I guess CMB radiation is just something that happens to other people.
Won't it be getting close to the Flood for those poor folks? Maybe we could bundle our tele-evangelists into a spaceship and send them there to spread salvation. The horrors of Earth must not be repeated elsewhere.
The questions that matter are functional, not philosophical. And those are relatively easy questions.
If the questions that matter are entirely functional, then strong AI is no big deal. You can create machines that can move faster than humans, you can create machines that can add faster than humans. Move along, nothing to see here. If you're talking about machines `being intelligent', you have to address Searle's concern.I think it is important not to conflate the fact that we don't understand something with the idea that it will be difficult once figured out or discovered as a consequence of some fortuitous sequence of events. That's been shown again and again not to be the case. It *may* be so, but it is by no means certain to be so, and for that matter, it isn't indicated by the complexity of the brain's hardware. The brain is considerably more formidable as a mass of immensely complex moderated connectivity than it is as a collection of cellular-level mystery machines, and a good deal of the complexity at the cellular level is almost certainly irrelevant to the task of thought -- keeping the cell alive is probably in no way related to non-pathological mental operation, yet there's a lot of hardware and systems involved in the task.
The biggest concern with this line of argument is that it fails to address the problem of verifiability. The Turing test is a very bad measure of intelligence. A better measure is Searle's `Chinese Room' argument. Basically, to be able to verify that a computer is `as intelligent' as a human, you have to know what being intelligent actually MEANS. Hence, just replicating the hardware might appear to do the trick, but there will be no way to be sure. If appearances are good enough, then we might already be there .That is exactly what Kurzweil is predicting. See Singularitarianism
In still other news, an exception to this process was found to occur in the neuronal wiring of ID proponents, where connections corresponding to increase in overall intelligence of the network were found to be strongly selected against.
Sacrilege! Sacrilege! His sacred noodly appendages shall smite them down!