Artificial Intelligence:
Moore's Law, COG, and you

Why are we so fascinated with robots? Sure, we want to make images of our own minds, but we've been mass-producing humans for millenia. Why robots? Why the silicon and metal images that word conjures in most people's minds?

According to The Practical Requirements for Making a Conscious Robot, it might very well turn out that the beloved science fiction picture of metal robots may be impractical; as one person puts it, "it is conceivable--if unlikely-- that the sheer speed and compactness of biochemically engineered processes in the brain are in fact unreproducible in other physical media." This does not, of course, stop the proponents of COG at MIT, and others elsewhere, from trying to create artificial intelligences out of the traditional materials.

As far as the future of artificial intelligence, we don't really know. It is generally only in science fiction that we find discussion of ethical problems that we could very well face in the near future (what rights do robots have? how do we keep them from turning on us? will we be able to keep pace with our artificial progeny?). Moore's Law states that computers keep doubling in speed every year or so (the time has varied over the years; some say that, due to physical limitations, Moore's Law will hit a wall soon); this means that the sheer volume of connections required to replicate the vast complexity of the human mind is coming more and more within our reach.

But is there more to our minds than simply the trillions of neural connections? Would creating a robot fail because we do not know how to duplicate some critical essence of consciousness, indeed because we fail to understand consciousness ourselves?

Heck, I don't know. Nobody does, really, until we try...

Two other interesting articles I found which I might write about later:

Minerats: Moore's Law is applied to the land mine problem.

Turing Test, etc: the results of an actual Turing Test, and what is needed to make a computer conscious-- if this is even possible.

Consciousness, information entropy, and AI
Back to the Physics Multiverse

Maintained by adamse@technologist.com