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Computers Theorized To Gain Consciousness by 2029

posted by Dopefish on Monday February 24 2014, @06:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the i-for-one-welcome-our-new-computer-overlords dept.

kef writes:

"By 2029, computers will be able to understand our language, learn from experience and outsmart even the most intelligent humans, according to Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil says:

Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity. So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I'm doing at Google is to try to go beyond what Watson could do. To do it at Google scale. Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages. Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading. It's doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn't understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn't understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying.

Skynet anyone?"

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by c0lo on Monday February 24 2014, @07:35AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 24 2014, @07:35AM (#5652) Journal

    Skynet anyone?

    (nah, too easy. Let me try something else)

    Keeping to the topic of "reading billions of pages" and the above mentioned meaning of AI in a rural upbringing, I'd like to remind Ray Kurzweil two important aspects:

    1. "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do"... since 1965 [wikipedia.org]
    2. Internet is for... [youtube.com]

    If, against astronomical odds, the first of them would become true today... (uhh, but I still like better the use of Rule 34 as applied to tentacles).

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @11:12AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @11:12AM (#5736)

    Hmmm ... I notice that the time frame for strong AI and for fusion coincides. That's a clear correlation which needs an explanation. Therefore I conclude that one of the following is true:

    • The fusion scientists expect that a strong AI will be able to solve all the remaining problems with fusion.
    • A strong AI would need so much power that you'd need to build a fusion power plant for it.

    ☺ (If this doesn't render correctly for you, here's the ASCII version: :-) )

  • (Score: 1) by JeanCroix on Monday February 24 2014, @02:54PM

    by JeanCroix (573) on Monday February 24 2014, @02:54PM (#5831)

    Skynet anyone?

    Nope. Just Chuck Testa.