Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community - View Single Post - Artificial Consciousness

jammies · 10-14-2009, 12:47 AM

I was randomly surfing links from one page to another and I stumbled upon this site - http://www.longbets.org/bets - where people are encouraged to make long-term predictions about the future, and then back those predictions with money. Of all the predictions on the site, the very first one was most intriguing to me; Mitch Kapor bet Ray Kurzweil that by 2029, no machine will have passed the famous Turing Test and proved itself to be conscious.

For those who don't know, Kapor was one of the founders of Lotus (the software maker not the car manufacturer), and an important figure in the world of open source software with his co-founding of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Kurzweil is a polymath who has worked in the fields of OCR, speech recognition, musical synthesizers, and artificial intelligence, as well as authoring several futurist books. Both men are therefore well versed in the possibilities of computer technology, which makes their disagreement on the AI question so interesting.

What do you think? Will we one day be matched and then inevitably surpassed by our robotic overlords? Or is there something special about human intelligence that can never be copied by a computer?

10-14-2009, 12:47 AM	#1
jammies Basement Chicken Choker Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: In a land without pants, or war, or want. But mostly we care about the pants. Exp:	Artificial Consciousness - Possible or Not? I was randomly surfing links from one page to another and I stumbled upon this site - http://www.longbets.org/bets - where people are encouraged to make long-term predictions about the future, and then back those predictions with money. Of all the predictions on the site, the very first one was most intriguing to me; Mitch Kapor bet Ray Kurzweil that by 2029, no machine will have passed the famous Turing Test and proved itself to be conscious. For those who don't know, Kapor was one of the founders of Lotus (the software maker not the car manufacturer), and an important figure in the world of open source software with his co-founding of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation). Kurzweil is a polymath who has worked in the fields of OCR, speech recognition, musical synthesizers, and artificial intelligence, as well as authoring several futurist books. Both men are therefore well versed in the possibilities of computer technology, which makes their disagreement on the AI question so interesting. What do you think? Will we one day be matched and then inevitably surpassed by our robotic overlords? Or is there something special about human intelligence that can never be copied by a computer? __________________ Better educated sadness than oblivious joy.