Udon and Artificial Machines
Lunch today was bladerunner-esque.
I was sitting in a Japanese Noodle and Sushi shop, reading Ray Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines. While there was no asian harp music in the background, there was a bustling ambience as people bought their salmon sushi.
The evidence is below:
Some Kurzweil notions such as a computer will have the processing power of the brain by 2020, I don’t think, necessarily translate to Artificial Intelligence. There’s a whole lot of software that has to run with that hardware.
However, I just made it through the prologue (it’s hard to eat udon noodles and read), but some of his comments/points do make sense.
- The best chess software can beat most players – years ago this was not the case
- Intelligence applications are very specific, but probably surpass most people
- Will machines think, or just calculate?
- Do people actually think, or just calculate as a response to stimuli?
Then we get into the philosophical side of what it is to be human. If you could upload someones memories into a machines would it be human?, could you tell the difference over the phone?
My Hypothesis: to be human is to have experiences and knowledge in a human body. Profound? Sorry it’s not. I think we can seriously worry about this when/if it happens. Perhaps we could describe Humans and an Artificial Intelligence both as “Intellectual entities” and get away from narcistic self bias. These concepts still seem strongly in the realms of science fiction.
“The Age of Spiritual Machines” seems like a though provoking read, and that’s my opinion just after the prologue !