If the "certain circumstances" were "when we have a warrant" he wouldn't have had to beat around the bush, he'd simply have said "when we have a warrant".
For instance, if I teach my kid about gravity by dropping a ball off a tower or by simply showing them a video of the same, isn't the idea and the concept learned just the same? As we say in software development, it's all about results.
If we're talking about a machine that made music or drove a tractor or something I'd tend to agree; but I woudn't agree that the robotic musician or driver were sentient. I don't want to lose the right to tinker.
I see no reason to think there couldn't be another arrangement of elements that would allow thinking to occur.
Well, I don't necessarily disagree with that. There may well be intelligent silicone based life forms out there somewhere that do in fact posess sentience. But knowing how computers are constructed and how they work, I can't see how a Turing-architecture computer could possibly posess true sentience, although as I said, it's easily faked.
Would you give a computer that seemed to think human rights? If I can't prove it isn't self-aware and thinking, why not?
So if I build one I don't have the right to modify it without its permission?
When the Turing test is passed in every way that we discern human thinking from programming, it may be morally repugnant to treat that equal intelligence as a slave or simple tool.
An CD isn't a live performance, but it achieves most of the same ends.
A good comparison. A recording of a live performance is just that -- a record of the performance. A photograph of a watermelon isn't a watermelon, but it can give you an idea of what a watermelon is, just as a simulation of a brain would give you an idea of what a brain is.
Is there something special about oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and a few other trace elements in an organic brain?
Without evidence to the contrary, I believe there must be.
What if the scientists made a perfect copy of your brain, molecule by molecule?
Then it would be a real brain, not an artificial brain. Your own brain is a copy of your parents brains; or rather, a mashup. It isn't a recording or a photograph, it's a brand new brain. I don't posit that we'll never make an artificial brain, and I think that someday we will, but it will be biochemical, not electronic.
Would you give a computer that seemed to think human rights?
Is it your contention that the laws of physics cannot be simulated?
No, my contention is that a simulation is not reality. A simulation is a only a tool to help one understand the reality you're simulating. A flight simulator can teach you to fly, but it won't take you to London.
Analog has aliasing called quanta
Quanta is is similar to alisaing, but it is not aliasing. A dog is similar to a cat, but a dog is not a cat.
Yet still you are ignorant. How fucking quaint. Were you the smartest kid on the shortest bus or something?
Can't tell if [insert adverb here] trolling, or commenting without having read the article You can't attend a dictionary. A dictionary is not an event. I teach an ESL class you might want to attend.
I think if I was trying to learn English, I'd rather have a native speaker as an instructor.
TFS looks like a bad google translation. Maybe it's because I'm on my first cup this morning, but ""Evidence servers of the Italian National Anti-Cybercrime Center for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure (CNAIPIC) have been breached" doesn't parse. There are some adverbs missing or something. Should it have read ""there is Evidence that servers of the Italian National Anti-Cybercrime Center for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure (CNAIPIC) have been breached"? Or was it "The 'evidence' servers of the Italian National Anti-Cybercrime Center for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure (CNAIPIC) have been breached"?
An individual chemical molecule, synaptic firing, or neuron doesn't think or have consciousness, but collectively they create incredibly complex behaviors, just as individual logic gates don't create the trajectory and explosion of an Angry Bird
But an amoeba, a one celled organism, does exhibit complex behavior -- seeking food and (IINM) fleeing predators.
Imagine a not-so-distant future where a cross-disciplinary team creates a sub-atomic resolution perfect scan of a living human brain, then captures all the data necessary to recreate a flawless simulation of that brain. Would that electronic brain not be a conscious, thinking --yet non-organic-- thing?
It would appear to be one, but I don't believe it would actually be one. I think it would still be nothing more than a simulation, although useful one in a different way that atom blast simulations are. Would you give it rights?
Without some external "magical" process the simplest explanation is that thought occurs within the brain.
Of course thought occurs within the brain (or perhaps withing the entire nervous system), and all magic is fraud, as is the thought that machines can think. Thought is a chemical reaction, not a computation.
The anger was probably because she was born via cesarean (but that's just a guess).
I'm starting to get the hang of it, too. I thought Patty was outnerding me, but then I noticed that even though she posted two picture of herself, the default one is still the generic pic they put up there.
I'm still trying to figure out what it will look like from someone else's perspective.
Where would you posit that consciousness comes from?
It's my belief that thoughts and feelings (and beliefs) are nothing more than complex chemical reactions. Of course, I have no further proof of that than the fact that drinking makes you drunk and lowers inhibitions, marijuana lowers combativeness in most people, and LSD can cause psychosis. I often wonder if the boiling when you mix an acid with a base is anger (but that's anthropomorphism, too).
The day may soon come when a chatbot will be indistinguishable from a human operator --perhaps more interesting than most of our Facebook friends. Will it be thinking? Will it be conscious?
I wrote one thirty years ago, so yes, fooling people is very easy. Since you're a psychologist you know how strong anthropomorphism is. But you know, when David Copperfield makes that elephant disappear, it's just a trick. We're easily fooled. David Ferrucci was right -- Watson doesn't think, and a submarine doesn't swim any more than a battleship does.
So, if a software-based brain passed a Turing duck test, on what basis would you know it wasn't conscious?
And that hits the nail squarely on the head -- that is the danger that Frank Herbert pointed out in DUNE; people using "intelligent" machines to enslave other humans. It isn't the computer that's intelligent, it's its programmer.
I guess there's some quirk of human psychology that causes people to see agency in every action.
Anthropomorphism. Your tic tac toe program reminds me of once when I pitted my "Artificial Insanity" program against the "Alice" program on the internet. It, too, was hilariously and spookily realistic. I had a Quake web site at the time (right before 2000 iirc) and posted the thing, if I can dig it up again I'll have to post it in a journal.
It's feasible that a similar (but better than mine) system could optimize the lessons for students.
Yes, it is. But as you know and these other guys obviously don't, it won't be thinking. The only intelligence in a program is the programmer's intelligence.
If the lesson planning AI makes a weird decision are people going to recognize it as a bug or divine providence?
They'll almost certainly not recognise it as a bug. My sister's grandson asked her how computers work, she shrugged her shoulders and said "it's magic". Unfortunately, I'm afraid that's what most people actually believe. However, she's kind of right -- it's magic in the same way that what David Copperfield does is magic.
Of course they do. Everything does. The statement is meaningless.
Programs can re-write the programs they run
Yes, I've written programs like that. It's trivial to do and means nothing. They only rewrite programs the way they're programmed to rewrite them.
Computers easily simulate analog
All computer output has aliasing. Analog does not. The aliasing can be very fine grained indeed, but it never goes away.
In short, you are ignorant and wrong about everything.
In short, I'm arguing with a religious zealot (and from your "End of story End of story End of story", a thirteen year old religious zealot). I built an analog computer in the 7th grade (actually more of an electric slide rule), built all sorts of electronic devices (I'd hack $10 transistor radios into $200 fuzzboxes with $1 worth of parts as a teenager, also trivial), studied the logic gates that make up a CPU and memory, programmed in several languages including assembly that I hand-assembled into the native machine code. I wrote a program that passes the Turing test, zealot. But if you're so sure I'm ignorant, you go right ahead and ignorantly keep believing your fantasies. Guys who really understand computers will be taking advantage of you; read Frank herbert's DUNE.
Or not, it doesn't matter to me what someone ignorant both of how computers work and how the brain works thinks.
The the difference between the simulation of consciousness and real consciousness is the same difference between a simulated atom blast and a real atom blast, and your bald assertion that there isn't any difference between simulation and reality is patently absurd.
Dreaming, creating, love, etc, its all output based on input just like a computer.
There are no facts to back up your belief, and having no evidence to the contrary is no more valid than saying that no evidence of the lack of a god is evidence that one exists. However, after a certain period of gestation a fetus has brain activity, but it's locked inside a womb with little to no stimulation whatever. Have you seen a baby born? They're fully awake when they come out, and different from each other. My first daughter looked around as if she was expecting SOMETHING but nothing like what happened. The second came out screaming in obvious anger.
Just because its not currently understood how it works does not mean its magic. That path leads to god.
There is no magic; all magic is trickery. As I stated above, we will likely build the Replicants from "Blade Runner", and they will be sentient, but they are biochemical, not electronic. And what to you have against God, your fears?
There is work on more complex wetware computers though.
Do you have a link to this new research? I certainly haven't heard of it.
Note that your link doesn't once contain the word "Consciousness" until the references, and then in the title of the paper "Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness". Here's a better link:
Consciousness
It has been defined, at one time or another, as: subjective experience; awareness; the ability to experience feelings; wakefulness; having a sense of selfhood; or as the executive control system of the mind.[2] Despite the difficulty of definition, many philosophers believe that there is a basic underlying intuition about consciousness that is shared by nearly all people.[3] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness:
"Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives."[4] In philosophy, consciousness is often said to imply four characteristics: subjectivity, change, continuity, and selectivity.[2][5] Philosopher Franz Brentano has also suggested intentionality or aboutness (that consciousness is about something); however, there is no consensus on whether intentionality is a requirement for consciousness.
<snip>
At one time consciousness was viewed with skepticism by many scientists and considered within the domain of philosophers and theologians, but in recent years it has been an increasingly significant topic of scientific research.[6]
They're only now just starting to study the phenomenon, and the word "emergent" doesn't show up at all in that article. Can you point to a citation by a competent authority that states that consciousness is an emergent behavior? If so you might want to update the wiki article on Consciousness with said link, because it doesn't mention emergent behavior at all.
A machine that has "subjective experience; awareness; the ability to experience feelings; wakefulness; having a sense of selfhood" can be faked. A simulation of an atom bomb produces no radiation, only the simulation of radiation. You can fly your flight simulator all day without moving an inch.
Re:Handicapping, Ridiculous, Anti-Progress
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3D Hurts Your Eyes
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The "dark hairy orifice" is the manufacturer's, not yours. It is they I am disagreeing with, not you. From my comment (with added bold) "It's hard telling what dark hairy orifice they pulled those numbers out of. Buying one makes no sense.
No, they aren't "just a differently configured abacus". Brains do more than compute. They originate ideas, they dream, they create, they appreciate, they love and they hate and they hurt. Machines can't and won't do any of those.
Brains are analog and chemical, with a whole lot of different chemicals and an electrical component as well. It "rewires" itself. Computers can't and won't.
The presence or absense of a soul has nothing to do with it. The very question you asked, "What does it take to become sentient" will have to be answered before we could build sentience, and we simply don't know what causes sentience or even what it is.
A computer is binary, on or off. It's just logic gates (and, or, nand, nor) strung together. It's supposed by many that sentience is a product of complexity, but if that's the case then the Earth itself is sentient; it's far more complex than any of its components.
Even though it was her own fault, she did suffer financial loss, and her doctor bills were all she was asking for. When McDonalds refused to pay the lawyers were called in. Had she not suffered financially, no lawyer would have likely taken the case.
However, thinking about it, I guess someone could run up psychiatrist bills over this and sue. So I'm probably wrong.
But what you can take from the article is that the enforced contradiction of focusing distances is a strain on your brain (which is not set up to deal with such paradoxes, I think)
The brain is amazingly flexible and can learn to cope with about any situation. I wore thick glasses all my life until I got a cataract in my left eye from prescription eyedrops to treat an infection. I had surgery on the eye, and they replaced its lens with a new type that sits on struts, allowing it to focus. So now my left eye is better than 20/20 at all distances, while my right eye is 20/400 plus since I'm over 40, that eye won't focus at all. So now I wear no corrective lenses, and even though everything beyond about fifteen inches is blurry with my right eye, things at a distance are clearer with both eyes open than with just the good eye open.
If I get the right eye operated on, my brain will have to adapt again, but it will adapt. The brain is the most amazing organ in the body.
I don't think he's trolling, I think he just didn't get the joke. It was a pretty good pun ("elicit drug") that's easily confused with the sort of aliteracy you often see here (like "they should loose their funding" when they really man "lose").
BTW, I did mean aliteracy, not illiteracy. The written word is superior to the spoken word, but only if used carefully. The aliterate doesn't understand that simple fact.
Before we create real intelligence we're going to have to understand what sentience is and how it works. People seem to forget the second part of science fiction is fiction. It's not only possible to write a program that will fool people into thinking it really can think, I've done it myself. What's more it was back in 1983 on a TS-1000 -- Z80 processor with 16K memory and no other storage (program loaded from tape).
The irony is I wrote the thing to demonstrate that machines can't think, and nobody believed me when I told them it was simple trickery like a stage magician uses. The magician doesn't really saw the woman in half, and the computer doesn't really think. It's a trick, nothing more.
The only science fiction I've read that got this right was Dune; the thinking machines that enslaved humans were controlled by other humans. Herbert didn't actually come out and say the machines didn't really think, but the implication was there.
If you don't know how a NAND gate works, you're not really qualified to even discuss it. We will likely (IMO almost inevitably) have replicants that actually think, but replicants are biological.
How many beads do I have to string on an abacus before it becomes sentient? A computer is simply an abacus with billions of beads. The danger to this "thinking machine" nonsense is that your grandkids' generation will have PETA-type nuts lobbying for machine rights. Anthropomorphism can be a dangerous thing.
Slashdot Mirror
If the "certain circumstances" were "when we have a warrant" he wouldn't have had to beat around the bush, he'd simply have said "when we have a warrant".
I think it was a Terry Pratchett reference: "He realized that not only was he not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he might even be a spoon".
For instance, if I teach my kid about gravity by dropping a ball off a tower or by simply showing them a video of the same, isn't the idea and the concept learned just the same? As we say in software development, it's all about results.
If we're talking about a machine that made music or drove a tractor or something I'd tend to agree; but I woudn't agree that the robotic musician or driver were sentient. I don't want to lose the right to tinker.
I see no reason to think there couldn't be another arrangement of elements that would allow thinking to occur.
Well, I don't necessarily disagree with that. There may well be intelligent silicone based life forms out there somewhere that do in fact posess sentience. But knowing how computers are constructed and how they work, I can't see how a Turing-architecture computer could possibly posess true sentience, although as I said, it's easily faked.
Would you give a computer that seemed to think human rights? If I can't prove it isn't self-aware and thinking, why not?
So if I build one I don't have the right to modify it without its permission?
When the Turing test is passed in every way that we discern human thinking from programming, it may be morally repugnant to treat that equal intelligence as a slave or simple tool.
That is exactly what I fear.
True, but that would spoil the joke.
An CD isn't a live performance, but it achieves most of the same ends.
A good comparison. A recording of a live performance is just that -- a record of the performance. A photograph of a watermelon isn't a watermelon, but it can give you an idea of what a watermelon is, just as a simulation of a brain would give you an idea of what a brain is.
Is there something special about oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and a few other trace elements in an organic brain?
Without evidence to the contrary, I believe there must be.
What if the scientists made a perfect copy of your brain, molecule by molecule?
Then it would be a real brain, not an artificial brain. Your own brain is a copy of your parents brains; or rather, a mashup. It isn't a recording or a photograph, it's a brand new brain. I don't posit that we'll never make an artificial brain, and I think that someday we will, but it will be biochemical, not electronic.
Would you give a computer that seemed to think human rights?
Is it your contention that the laws of physics cannot be simulated?
No, my contention is that a simulation is not reality. A simulation is a only a tool to help one understand the reality you're simulating. A flight simulator can teach you to fly, but it won't take you to London.
Analog has aliasing called quanta
Quanta is is similar to alisaing, but it is not aliasing. A dog is similar to a cat, but a dog is not a cat.
Yet still you are ignorant. How fucking quaint. Were you the smartest kid on the shortest bus or something?
You just lost the debate.
Can't tell if [insert adverb here] trolling, or commenting without having read the article
You can't attend a dictionary. A dictionary is not an event.
I teach an ESL class you might want to attend.
I think if I was trying to learn English, I'd rather have a native speaker as an instructor.
I got a grin out of that typoo. ;)
"Look, someone wreaked havoc! Lest wreck the havoc someone wreaked!"
Wreck havoc and lose the dogs of war!
TFS looks like a bad google translation. Maybe it's because I'm on my first cup this morning, but ""Evidence servers of the Italian National Anti-Cybercrime Center for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure (CNAIPIC) have been breached" doesn't parse. There are some adverbs missing or something. Should it have read ""there is Evidence that servers of the Italian National Anti-Cybercrime Center for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure (CNAIPIC) have been breached"? Or was it "The 'evidence' servers of the Italian National Anti-Cybercrime Center for the Protection of Critical Infrastructure (CNAIPIC) have been breached"?
Coffee... need more coffee...
An individual chemical molecule, synaptic firing, or neuron doesn't think or have consciousness, but collectively they create incredibly complex behaviors, just as individual logic gates don't create the trajectory and explosion of an Angry Bird
But an amoeba, a one celled organism, does exhibit complex behavior -- seeking food and (IINM) fleeing predators.
Imagine a not-so-distant future where a cross-disciplinary team creates a sub-atomic resolution perfect scan of a living human brain, then captures all the data necessary to recreate a flawless simulation of that brain. Would that electronic brain not be a conscious, thinking --yet non-organic-- thing?
It would appear to be one, but I don't believe it would actually be one. I think it would still be nothing more than a simulation, although useful one in a different way that atom blast simulations are. Would you give it rights?
Without some external "magical" process the simplest explanation is that thought occurs within the brain.
Of course thought occurs within the brain (or perhaps withing the entire nervous system), and all magic is fraud, as is the thought that machines can think. Thought is a chemical reaction, not a computation.
The anger was probably because she was born via cesarean (but that's just a guess).
I'm starting to get the hang of it, too. I thought Patty was outnerding me, but then I noticed that even though she posted two picture of herself, the default one is still the generic pic they put up there.
I'm still trying to figure out what it will look like from someone else's perspective.
Where would you posit that consciousness comes from?
It's my belief that thoughts and feelings (and beliefs) are nothing more than complex chemical reactions. Of course, I have no further proof of that than the fact that drinking makes you drunk and lowers inhibitions, marijuana lowers combativeness in most people, and LSD can cause psychosis. I often wonder if the boiling when you mix an acid with a base is anger (but that's anthropomorphism, too).
The day may soon come when a chatbot will be indistinguishable from a human operator --perhaps more interesting than most of our Facebook friends. Will it be thinking? Will it be conscious?
I wrote one thirty years ago, so yes, fooling people is very easy. Since you're a psychologist you know how strong anthropomorphism is. But you know, when David Copperfield makes that elephant disappear, it's just a trick. We're easily fooled. David Ferrucci was right -- Watson doesn't think, and a submarine doesn't swim any more than a battleship does.
So, if a software-based brain passed a Turing duck test, on what basis would you know it wasn't conscious?
And that hits the nail squarely on the head -- that is the danger that Frank Herbert pointed out in DUNE; people using "intelligent" machines to enslave other humans. It isn't the computer that's intelligent, it's its programmer.
I guess there's some quirk of human psychology that causes people to see agency in every action.
Anthropomorphism. Your tic tac toe program reminds me of once when I pitted my "Artificial Insanity" program against the "Alice" program on the internet. It, too, was hilariously and spookily realistic. I had a Quake web site at the time (right before 2000 iirc) and posted the thing, if I can dig it up again I'll have to post it in a journal.
It's feasible that a similar (but better than mine) system could optimize the lessons for students.
Yes, it is. But as you know and these other guys obviously don't, it won't be thinking. The only intelligence in a program is the programmer's intelligence.
If the lesson planning AI makes a weird decision are people going to recognize it as a bug or divine providence?
They'll almost certainly not recognise it as a bug. My sister's grandson asked her how computers work, she shrugged her shoulders and said "it's magic". Unfortunately, I'm afraid that's what most people actually believe. However, she's kind of right -- it's magic in the same way that what David Copperfield does is magic.
Brains follow the laws of physics
Of course they do. Everything does. The statement is meaningless.
Programs can re-write the programs they run
Yes, I've written programs like that. It's trivial to do and means nothing. They only rewrite programs the way they're programmed to rewrite them.
Computers easily simulate analog
All computer output has aliasing. Analog does not. The aliasing can be very fine grained indeed, but it never goes away.
In short, you are ignorant and wrong about everything.
In short, I'm arguing with a religious zealot (and from your "End of story End of story End of story", a thirteen year old religious zealot). I built an analog computer in the 7th grade (actually more of an electric slide rule), built all sorts of electronic devices (I'd hack $10 transistor radios into $200 fuzzboxes with $1 worth of parts as a teenager, also trivial), studied the logic gates that make up a CPU and memory, programmed in several languages including assembly that I hand-assembled into the native machine code. I wrote a program that passes the Turing test, zealot. But if you're so sure I'm ignorant, you go right ahead and ignorantly keep believing your fantasies. Guys who really understand computers will be taking advantage of you; read Frank herbert's DUNE.
Or not, it doesn't matter to me what someone ignorant both of how computers work and how the brain works thinks.
The the difference between the simulation of consciousness and real consciousness is the same difference between a simulated atom blast and a real atom blast, and your bald assertion that there isn't any difference between simulation and reality is patently absurd.
Dreaming, creating, love, etc, its all output based on input just like a computer.
There are no facts to back up your belief, and having no evidence to the contrary is no more valid than saying that no evidence of the lack of a god is evidence that one exists. However, after a certain period of gestation a fetus has brain activity, but it's locked inside a womb with little to no stimulation whatever. Have you seen a baby born? They're fully awake when they come out, and different from each other. My first daughter looked around as if she was expecting SOMETHING but nothing like what happened. The second came out screaming in obvious anger.
Just because its not currently understood how it works does not mean its magic. That path leads to god.
There is no magic; all magic is trickery. As I stated above, we will likely build the Replicants from "Blade Runner", and they will be sentient, but they are biochemical, not electronic. And what to you have against God, your fears?
There is work on more complex wetware computers though.
Do you have a link to this new research? I certainly haven't heard of it.
Note that your link doesn't once contain the word "Consciousness" until the references, and then in the title of the paper "Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness". Here's a better link:
They're only now just starting to study the phenomenon, and the word "emergent" doesn't show up at all in that article. Can you point to a citation by a competent authority that states that consciousness is an emergent behavior? If so you might want to update the wiki article on Consciousness with said link, because it doesn't mention emergent behavior at all.
A machine that has "subjective experience; awareness; the ability to experience feelings; wakefulness; having a sense of selfhood" can be faked. A simulation of an atom bomb produces no radiation, only the simulation of radiation. You can fly your flight simulator all day without moving an inch.
It's been a few years since I saw The Matrix. Lets see, the red pill was Phenobarbital and the blue pill was Sildenafil?
This blue pill is interesting.
The "dark hairy orifice" is the manufacturer's, not yours. It is they I am disagreeing with, not you. From my comment (with added bold) "It's hard telling what dark hairy orifice they pulled those numbers out of. Buying one makes no sense.
No, they aren't "just a differently configured abacus". Brains do more than compute. They originate ideas, they dream, they create, they appreciate, they love and they hate and they hurt. Machines can't and won't do any of those.
Brains are analog and chemical, with a whole lot of different chemicals and an electrical component as well. It "rewires" itself. Computers can't and won't.
The presence or absense of a soul has nothing to do with it. The very question you asked, "What does it take to become sentient" will have to be answered before we could build sentience, and we simply don't know what causes sentience or even what it is.
A computer is binary, on or off. It's just logic gates (and, or, nand, nor) strung together. It's supposed by many that sentience is a product of complexity, but if that's the case then the Earth itself is sentient; it's far more complex than any of its components.
Even though it was her own fault, she did suffer financial loss, and her doctor bills were all she was asking for. When McDonalds refused to pay the lawyers were called in. Had she not suffered financially, no lawyer would have likely taken the case.
However, thinking about it, I guess someone could run up psychiatrist bills over this and sue. So I'm probably wrong.
But what you can take from the article is that the enforced contradiction of focusing distances is a strain on your brain (which is not set up to deal with such paradoxes, I think)
The brain is amazingly flexible and can learn to cope with about any situation. I wore thick glasses all my life until I got a cataract in my left eye from prescription eyedrops to treat an infection. I had surgery on the eye, and they replaced its lens with a new type that sits on struts, allowing it to focus. So now my left eye is better than 20/20 at all distances, while my right eye is 20/400 plus since I'm over 40, that eye won't focus at all. So now I wear no corrective lenses, and even though everything beyond about fifteen inches is blurry with my right eye, things at a distance are clearer with both eyes open than with just the good eye open.
If I get the right eye operated on, my brain will have to adapt again, but it will adapt. The brain is the most amazing organ in the body.
I don't think he's trolling, I think he just didn't get the joke. It was a pretty good pun ("elicit drug") that's easily confused with the sort of aliteracy you often see here (like "they should loose their funding" when they really man "lose").
BTW, I did mean aliteracy, not illiteracy. The written word is superior to the spoken word, but only if used carefully. The aliterate doesn't understand that simple fact.
Before we create real intelligence we're going to have to understand what sentience is and how it works. People seem to forget the second part of science fiction is fiction. It's not only possible to write a program that will fool people into thinking it really can think, I've done it myself. What's more it was back in 1983 on a TS-1000 -- Z80 processor with 16K memory and no other storage (program loaded from tape).
The irony is I wrote the thing to demonstrate that machines can't think, and nobody believed me when I told them it was simple trickery like a stage magician uses. The magician doesn't really saw the woman in half, and the computer doesn't really think. It's a trick, nothing more.
The only science fiction I've read that got this right was Dune; the thinking machines that enslaved humans were controlled by other humans. Herbert didn't actually come out and say the machines didn't really think, but the implication was there.
If you don't know how a NAND gate works, you're not really qualified to even discuss it. We will likely (IMO almost inevitably) have replicants that actually think, but replicants are biological.
How many beads do I have to string on an abacus before it becomes sentient? A computer is simply an abacus with billions of beads. The danger to this "thinking machine" nonsense is that your grandkids' generation will have PETA-type nuts lobbying for machine rights. Anthropomorphism can be a dangerous thing.