I ran into a reference to Roy Kurzweil in a not-too-good novel last night (802.11 was a data transmission frequency). Which started me thinking about why it is that some people not only believe that machines (computers) can become intelligent, but are also in a state of high anticipation.
There's lots of definitions of intelligence, of course. Since no generally agreed-on standard has been expounded, it's easy to play fast and loose with the concept.
Kurzweil is a classic proponent of the Turing Test. It will determine that the computer in question is intelligent if one may have a conversation with it and not be at all aware that it is a computer. This is obviously not a face-to-face situation.
I keep having visions of a Racter 5.2 running on a large parallel processor that could, indeed, carry on a conversation with some versimilitude. But I can also never imagine a situation where the computer could do more than parrot selected snippets of recorded past conversations. I'm not convinced that the Turing Test is a gauge of intelligence, however much it seemed so to Allen Turing back in the 1040's.
I have an Intel processor on a key ring - probably an old P90 with math problems. In one point of view, it and all other processors are wafers of carefully contaminated silicon. They are numeric machines, which can never do more than act upon numbers by direction of other numbers.
I can't see this as a basis for intelligence. The software may be an attractive diversion, in that it can direct the processor to simulate any number of things - but is such an apparent intelligence ever anything but artificial? Here I do not mean "artificial intelligence" in the science fictional sense of a truely intelligent computer, but as a sham of the "real" thing, whatever that may be.
Kurzweil (to my perception) has absolutely no comprehension of the mechanical basis of a computer. He seems to have an absolutely rapturous anticipation of forming significant relationships with the objects in his life. I could be mistaken - the book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" caused several problems on my part, and I could not get through it.
Simply stated - if I have taken a screwdriver to it, I can't quite see it as ever becoming intelligent. I started off repairing computers at the component level. Transistors, even in large aggregatons, don't have potential for becoming more than amplifiers and switches.
Some things are known about the human brain, but how it functions is still unknown. The electrical activity thus far traced tells us about as much as an ammeter does about individual electrons.
This is not a computer-oriented forum, but all of us use the miserable things. So, are they going to become intelligent?
There's lots of definitions of intelligence, of course. Since no generally agreed-on standard has been expounded, it's easy to play fast and loose with the concept.
Kurzweil is a classic proponent of the Turing Test. It will determine that the computer in question is intelligent if one may have a conversation with it and not be at all aware that it is a computer. This is obviously not a face-to-face situation.
I keep having visions of a Racter 5.2 running on a large parallel processor that could, indeed, carry on a conversation with some versimilitude. But I can also never imagine a situation where the computer could do more than parrot selected snippets of recorded past conversations. I'm not convinced that the Turing Test is a gauge of intelligence, however much it seemed so to Allen Turing back in the 1040's.
I have an Intel processor on a key ring - probably an old P90 with math problems. In one point of view, it and all other processors are wafers of carefully contaminated silicon. They are numeric machines, which can never do more than act upon numbers by direction of other numbers.
I can't see this as a basis for intelligence. The software may be an attractive diversion, in that it can direct the processor to simulate any number of things - but is such an apparent intelligence ever anything but artificial? Here I do not mean "artificial intelligence" in the science fictional sense of a truely intelligent computer, but as a sham of the "real" thing, whatever that may be.
Kurzweil (to my perception) has absolutely no comprehension of the mechanical basis of a computer. He seems to have an absolutely rapturous anticipation of forming significant relationships with the objects in his life. I could be mistaken - the book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" caused several problems on my part, and I could not get through it.
Simply stated - if I have taken a screwdriver to it, I can't quite see it as ever becoming intelligent. I started off repairing computers at the component level. Transistors, even in large aggregatons, don't have potential for becoming more than amplifiers and switches.
Some things are known about the human brain, but how it functions is still unknown. The electrical activity thus far traced tells us about as much as an ammeter does about individual electrons.
This is not a computer-oriented forum, but all of us use the miserable things. So, are they going to become intelligent?