On 7/11/07, Erik van der Werf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 7/11/07, Richard Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This sort of semantic nitpicking may seem too severe. However, it keeps me > from falling into the camp of those who believe that machines will one day > literally become intelligent, develop self-awareness, and achieve consciousness. > > Ain't gonna happen. > -- > Rich > > P.S. -- I hated the movie "AI". > So how would you define intelligence?
Hmmm. Good question. I guess you're asking that because I insisted that machines won't be intelligent. O.k., as I admitted, I was engaging in some semantic nitpicking. I'll amend my previous statement. Without falling into the camp, perhaps I may visit it. Machines and algorithms _will_ one day become intelligent. [Surprise!] That will happen when those machines are made out of meat, having evolved over centuries -- nay, eons -- to have extremely complex biochemical systems (endocrine system to regulate production of pheromones, e.g.) to support them, and when the algorithms that are implemented in those meat machines are implemented as electrochemical impulses within brain tissue, memory storage encoded as RNA, that sort of thing. Needless to say, these meat machines will require a circulatory system to provide -- among other things -- cooling for the brain. They'll also need a respiratory system to supply it with oxygen, and a digestive system to provide fuel for the energy required to keep the brain, the endocrine system, and all that support "hardware" going. Silicon, on the other hand, is never going to become that smart. Even the scale of nanotechnology is too gross to to permit it to compete with meat. Sure, I'll grant that intelligence may simply be "emergent behavior" of a "complex system", but inorganic matter just isn't -- and never will be -- complex enough to hold a candle to meat, which _is_ sufficiently complex to be intelligent. Even insects (if you grant that they are meat) are more complex, and exhibit more intelligence, than the most sophisticated supercomputer made from inorganic materials will ever be or do. Perhaps some day a mad Dr. Frankenstein will implement massively parallel supercomputing using an array of brains in petri dishes. But it will still be the meat that is intelligent. It's the only substance capable of that. -- Rich _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
