At 7:55 PM -0400 05/11/2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>In a message dated 11/1/00 12:16:28 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
><<
> (Personal hope for the future: we acheive "uploading" by 2050 or so and
> physical exploration & short-term terraforming becomes moot; if I'm
> wrong, I'm dead, so it doesn't much matter.)
>
>Probably won't happen any time soon (next century or so) as near as I can get
>from reading current books on consciousness. The key element to consciousness
>may be having sensations. Consciousness is the second order representations
>of sensation and how the body reacts to them "The Feeling of What Happens" -
>Damaso. So unless a machine can have sensory input it will not be conscious.
>Now this imput could be from any one of number of sensors but the result
>would something that does not feel they we feel.
But that just necessitates the production of stimulus (not necessarily
*real* objects, mind, virtual ones if generated with enough detail could
suffice, and would allow the interface perhaps to be handled by algorithms
thus lessening the need to program it all "hard") or the access to stimulus
through specially designed interface portals.
I think 2050 is extremely unlikely, but I don't think it's SO much farther
off, at least necessarily. Maybe 200 years, or 250? ThoughI mean barring
really major crisis incidents, though, so that's not a bet. It could be
1000, who knows! It all depends on how deep we need to emulate the hardware
of physical brains to get an isomorphic version of consicousness in a
computer. I also think demanding something too much "like" us will slacken
if it's too difficult. Look, it's a weak example, but my mom could deal
with never speaking to any of her kids in her first language (well, until
now, poor woman). If our AI offspring were somewhat different from us,
well, what do we expect?
Neat idea: maybe the amount of processing necessary for the first real-life
stimulus portals (like a gleisner bot in Egan's polis stories) would be
rare. Imagine a whole community of people "skinriding" as one by one they
go for a walk. Stim in, but no controls out till it's your turn. A whole
different experience of self and community. Weird.
