Wayne on AI
Being interested in robotics I get to hear a lot of arguments about what robots can or can't do, especially regarding robot intelligence. I will now clarify my opinion:
1) There is virtually nothing we can do that a robot couldn't hypothetically do better and faster.
2) That includes, provided the human race doesn't kill itself before developing the appropriate technology, thinking and conciousness.
Most people are not aware just how advanced technology already is. We have a robot that speaks perfectly (in Japanese, but nonetheless), a robot that recognizes itself in the mirror, artificial brains that can learn to read from scratch on their own, artificial brains that can learn to predict the stock market with better accuracy than entire teams of experienced wall street advisors, artificial brains that can perform quick and accurate medical diagnosis, etc etc etc. We have limited self-propigating learning systems which are essentially identical to the early (fetal) human brain. We have AI which passes the turing test for 2-3 year old humans (that means that adult humans talking to the AI can not tell the difference between it and a 2-3 year old child).
People are going to be hit in the face with a lot of these things very soon. There is a very high potential for household affordable machines which are equal to adult human brains in the next 30ish years. There is a very high potential at least one super computer will well exceed that capacity and be well on the way to developing even better intelligences, resulting in a singularity event.
This scares many people, putting things out of our hands in a sense. However I try to be more optimistic, the moment our species picked up a rock or a stick our evolution became technological rather than purely biological, and this is just the next step. There is a risk of harm yes, but the potential for improvement via this path is nearly infinite. Also, at very least, I think it will shut up the fundamentalist, after all once something other than human is on our level the whole god's image thing loses a lot of thrust. Here is where most people will say that computers will always be, at best, simulations of our grandeur, that we can never know they actually think. To those people I point out that you can never know humans, or even your own brain, are actually thinking.
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