Machines lack the creativity for novel ideas and have no feelings and no fond memories of their youth. But recent technological advances are narrowing the gap between human brains and circuitry. At Stanford University, bioengineers are replicating the complicated parallel processing of neural networks on microchips. Another development--a robot named Darwin VII--has a camera and a set of metal jaws so that it can interact with its environment and learn, the way juvenile animals do. Researchers at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, Calif., modeled Darwin's brain on rat and ape brains. The developments raise a natural question: If computer processing eventually apes nature's neural networks, will cold silicon ever be truly able to think? And how will we judge whether it does? More than 50 years ago British mathematician and philosopher Alan Turing invented an ingenious strategy to address this question, and the pursuit of this strategy has taught science a great deal about designing artificial intelligence, a field now known as AI. At the same time, it has shed some light on human cognition. So what, exactly, is this elusive capacity we call "thinking"? People often use the word to describe processes that involve consciousness, understanding and creativity. In contrast, current computers merely follow the instructions provided by their programming.

In 1950, an era when silicon microchips did not yet exist, Turing realized that as computers got smarter, this question about artificial intelligence would eventually arise. [For more on Turing's life and work, see box on opposite page.] In what is arguably the most famous philosophy paper ever written, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Turing simply replaced the question "Can machines think?" with "Can a machine--a computer--pass the imitation game?" That is, can a computer converse so naturally that it could fool a person into thinking that it was a human being?

View: Full Article | Source: Scientific American

Creating real Artifical Inteligence should be possible, but I think that we shouldn`t create it/them. After all, maybe they take over the world.

Son of a b****, don't they learn from the movies? Yeah, it would be a great achievement, but you know they're not going to set this AI into a sealed vault never to be opened. We'll see them in products. Afterall, what do people want most these days?


$$$

My problem with this all is when does it go from artificial intelligence to real? where do we draw the line.... do we or the machines decide when they are actually concious? if we use the simplest guidelines ...........presence of self, knowing ones on existance., the fear of death, the will to live, then that day may not be as far away as some belive. And if that day comes, what then? we will have created life from nothing. will we be i wonder kind gods or cruel masters?

I think the wierdest thing to envisage is that the more intelligent machines become, the more they will begin to relieve us of menial jobs.
then what do we do?
in history there have been big disputes, many thousands of people lost their jobs as clothes washers when the washing machine was invented. can you imagine robot butlers, waiters, nurses, taxi drivers, retail assistants, farmers etc?
i'm wondering if the high presence of machinery in every industry is why people are signing on so much these days. (in UK anyway)
on the one hand it would free us up to do more intelligent work and follow more esoteric pursuits, but... not everyone has the will or intelligence to become scientists, artists, politicians. (scrap politicians ) the majority might just end up signing on more, living on government handouts.
with an army of robots, we could either build ships to the stars; or... watch tv all day.
It's up to us.

Well, it's true that robots will enter the labour market and there will be less jobs for ordinary people. As usual, poor people will become even poorer, the rich will become more powerful, and the society will become much more corrupted then it is today. Entertainment will take much more important place in our lifes.
Oh, and when we will reach the point of AI, it won't take long before this AI will create even better AI, and so on...So it may turn out to be interesting. Perhaps Silicon based life will reach other stars and colonize them, not carbon based life. But then again, as time comes, we will become more silicon and less carbon based. So it may turn out that there won't be AI or life enymore, there will be just our super AI...

good point! the way things are going we can't avoid integrating with our computers and high technology.
anyway, a guy posted up a news story on here about scientists integrating silicon chips with cloned braincells already.
lemme find it...
... ok Here

robots take over all the jobs = communism

anyway this is typically what some religions thinks happened long ago, you get to advanced, something f***s up and sends us back god knows how many years, and the cycle starts over again

Or we live until we create powerful enough computer to simulate a universe from the beginning and it evolves until the human species within it can do the same and so it continues forever. For all we know, we can be in one of those simulations...

We are machines, sophisticated machines, we can be artifficial intelligence at the look of other kind of intelligent life, think of this

Anyone interested in these types of issues and creating a super intelligence check out this video. Its a rough cut of a movie about the 21st century technology, post humans, artilects, the singularity, robots, simulation argument, implants and more!

Building gods
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1079797626827646234

the future potential of the hardware isnt the problem, it's just getting that seed ai, the first A.I to improve upon itself at a fast speed.

on the video one of them mentions that with nanotech, it will be possible to create a computer billions of times faster than the human brain and it would only be the size of a 1 grain of sand. powerful eh?

I think that technology will be the next step in our self directed evolution. Increasing our capabilities with technology. We are already doing it today, especially with communications.

havn't seen this one yet, tnx...

My guess is we'll end up creating Artificial intellignece by accident, its possible that everything we're doing might lead to some form of conciousness being formed right under our noses and we may have no idea when it'll occur.

I think very soon we will be able to have chatting computers that make us believe we are chatting with computers. The issue had been how do we incorporate world knowledge into a computer. Now everything is there on the internet. We just need to build a machine that is capable of extracting that information and using it for question answering. Read this blog I wrote if you have the time and interest

http://indradhanush-laal.blogspot.com/

Who knows if, or if not, A-I would take over the world.

Nevertheless anything is possible... but humans are just getting lazier and lazier, wouldnt you agree? Technology assits us. I don't believe it could kill us, unless, it has the ability to launch "weapons of mass destruction"... then we'd be in trouble