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Comment by auggierose | Hacker News Reader

Machine brains are already much "smarter" than human brains. For certain tasks, that is, like calculation. With increased computing power, these tasks will grow more and more. But will machines ever be REALLY smarter than humans? I will only believe that when I see it. This question might be (but does not necessarily have to be) related to the question of all questions: Can machines have consciousness, like we do?

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There is a growing realization that cognition is fundamentally _embodied_ cognition. If you think of the mind as an ethereal entity removed of its physicality (or at the very least made out of a different substance from the body - that is to say, substance dualism) then it is easy to imagine the following scenarios. Containers are unimportant, so minds can be uploaded and downloaded, whether machine or human the housing is unimportant.

If we come to accept cognition as fundamentally embodied then it becomes less sensible to compare cognition across differing architectures - human cognition will always be quite unlike any other type of cognition except itself. I think machines will have consciousness (why should they not be able to, what is so special about us that would limit this phenomenon to us?) but it will be a machine consciousness and radically different from ours.

I think we're going to have to get a lot more fine-grained about how we talk about features and functions of brains whether human or machine. You've already put "smarter" in quotes which shows that already you're aware of how blunt and crude our terms are.

Does this all seem reasonable?

I understand your point of view, which is basically the one shared by many people in CS. But personally, I don't think that machines will ever develop consciousness as we have it. Because I understand how current technology works, and there is no consciousness there. I would have no qualms shutting down a machine, even if it begged me to keep it running.

Just like a computer science freshman I imbued computer systems with magic. Oh look I feed this machine numbers and it spits out words (text to speech). Or I search for something and a magic algorithm find me the result. As I learned more about algorithms and data-structures, that magic disappeared. Now I had the same feeling about hardware. This magic black square on the motherboard that can execute a set of couple of hundred or so assembly instructions many billions of times per second. Then I took a hardware architecture class and poof! magic disappeared. We started with transistors and build to designing our own CPU chip.

I am guessing something similar is going on with our understanding of the brain and mind. I think we just haven't figured out a good way to model and represent knowledge. There was terrible optimism at the end of 50s that super human AI will take over in just a decades. But it didn't happen. We have sort of been stomping our feet (I personally don't consider playing chess an AI achievement). I think there will be a breakthrough -- maybe it will be a simple organization of existing ML and knowledge representation methods (neural networks, mixed with evolutionary algorithms) or some new framework - OR - enough of very specific applications (chess playing, image recognition and speech recognition) advanced will slowly chip away at this "magic" AI core until maybe nothing will be left. And we'll look back at that and at our brains and say "ah, it wasn't that complicated after all, it is just all these specific subsystems working together"...

Current technology != future technology. Sorry, induction doesn't work that way.

I'm more interested in teaching computers lateral thinking, and thus the beginning of creativity - what I believe to be the real hallmark of human thought.

Can a computer be "processing" water pipes, analyzing the construction of pipes for the best flow, then jump to half-pipes and building a new half-pipe so skateboarders can flow better and produce better tricks, get more air, etc. Albeit a kind of lame example, but that jump is crucial, and something we do flawlessly. There's no hard guideline to what triggers our brains to jump. It could be audible, visual, or tangentially related to the task at hand. It could be body language of someone talking to us, that reminds us of somebody else, that reminds us of... Logical thought isn't that beautiful to me. It's predictable. Lateral thinking is though, and that's where all of the good inventions/discoveries begin anyways.

Analogy-making is an important part of perception.

As far as I can tell, people only wonder about this if they assume that consciousness has some kind if supernatural aspect to it.

I'm not the OP, and most certainly I do not believe there is any "supernatural" aspect behind the human mind, but what will really, really convince me that the Singularity would have arrived will be the moment when robots/machines will have understood humor. Them, the machines, being able to actually make new jokes will be the decisive proof that we, humans, are not the only "intelligent" entities on this planet.

And even more OT, this reminded me that I don't recollect any "robot jokes" in any of the science fiction books I've read. Granted, there weren't that many (just the basics: Asimov, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, some Stanislaw Lem), but I'm curious if any SF writer wrote "robot jokes", more exactly jokes that us, humans, think will be made by robots in the not-so-distant future.

Another in a long line of goalposts that assert "this is intelligence". Chess fell, driving fell, machine translation is falling. Robot storytellers (which, i think would cover humor) are only a matter of time.

Have you ever read transcripts from the Loebner Prize Competition, a Turing (con)test they hold each year? Machines keep getting funnier.

http://www.worldsbestchatbot.com/Competition_Transcripts

Lem's best work (IMO) is the stuff about robot culture, including jokes. Try The Cyberiad and Mortal Engines.

Edit: Though, to be fair, Lem didn't write near-future SF, his robot stories were more like alternate universes.

Robert Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Read it.

Not really. Believing a turing machine can create consciousness has implicit assumptions that may or may not be true. Is consciousness completely computational or does it piggyback on some qualitative attribute of the substrate? Can the processes of the brain be reduced to data structures and algorithms? Can simplified models be an adequate replacement for "chaotic" processes of the brain which are not computable without remainder using silicon? There are plenty of known unknowns which have implications for the possibility of such simulations. If you think the simulation of consciousness is a given then you probably have a hand-wavy understanding of the problem.

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