<bobcook39...@gmail.com> wrote: “I don't think machines will be able to duplicate what a bird brain can do, > any time, ever. Machines which we can invent are things that we can > understand almost completely. >
I do not think there is rigorous proof of this. On the contrary, decades ago, computers began doing things that people considered creative, such as re-inventing devices that AT&T patented in the early 20th century, and winning at chess and go. So far, every time people have set a goal post and claimed "computers will never do this" the people have been wrong. They have responded by moving the goal posts and saying, "that is not intelligent after all." > However consciousness, even animal consciousness, is something we will > never understand sufficiently to create it, *because it is a supernatural > phenomenon.”* > Supernatural phenomena do not exist, by definition. The universe and every particle in it is governed by uniform laws of nature. There are no exceptions to them. Any phenomenon that occurs in the universe is natural, by definition, and explicable in principle. At least, that is how things appear to be. That is the basis of science. No exceptions have been discovered so far, and there is no reason to think that brains or intelligence is an exception. A great deal is known about how brains work, and there are no pending mysteries that seem to be outside the known laws of physics and chemistry. That does not mean people will be able to invent machines capable of sentient artificial intelligence. That may be beyond our creative capabilities. Our species might go extinct before we achieve that. However, if we fail it will not be because intelligence is supernatural. Nothing is, anywhere. I think it is likely the human race will go extinct before we can colonize the entire galaxy or build a Dyson Sphere to capture all of the energy from a star. I suspect such achievements are beyond our capability. But, sentient, powerful artificial intelligence seems close at hand to me. I expect it will be achieved in the next 50 to 200 years. There has been much more progress toward it than many experts predicted in the 1980s. I doubt anyone would have predicted that by the year 2010, a computer would beat any human at the game of Jeopardy, for example, or drive cars more skillfully with fewer accidents than any human. I myself thought that effective self-driving cars were decades away. Again, this is not to suggest that artificial intelligence will resemble natural human intelligence, or be mistaken for it. I suppose it will even more different from human intelligence than, say the intelligence of a whale, dog, or a bat is from ours. I doubt that artificial intelligence will be encumbered with any emotional content such as longing, fear or love. Arthur Clarke suspected that these things might arise naturally as a consequence of intelligence, as emergent phenomena. I do not think so. - Jed
