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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?"
(Score: 2, Informative) by HiThere on Monday February 24 2014, @08:30PM
I think you're confusing consciousness with motivation. They are quite distinct, though, of course related in the sense that it's nearly impossible to have consciousness without having SOME motivation. Even a thermostat manages to have SOME motivation. And some consciousness. (I.e., it strives to maintain a particular state in homeostasis...though homeostasis isn't the only possible motive. Consciousness is the response to a current situation, and motivation is which among the possible responses that you notice (i.e., are conscious of) you choose. The language is a bit sloppy, but I trust you understand what I mean.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.