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Physicists, philosophers, professors, authors, cognitive scientists, and many others have weighed in on edge.org's annual question 2015: What do you think about machines that think? See all 186 responses here
Also, what do you think?
My 2ยข: There's been a lot of focus on potential disasters that are almost certainly not going to happen. E.g. a robot uprising, or mass poverty through unemployment. Most manufacturers of artificial intelligence won't program their machines to seek self preservation at the expense of their human masters. It wouldn't sell. Secondly, if robots can one day produce almost everything we need, including more robots, with almost no human labour required, then robot-powered factories will become like libraries: relatively cheap to maintain, plentiful, and a public one will be set up in every town or suburb, for public use. If you think the big corporations wouldn't allow it, why do they allow public libraries?
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday January 23 2015, @08:10AM
I also don't believe that we can maintain exponential growth for much longer. But we might have some disruptive breakthrough in quantum computing. *If* that happens (in a way enabling us to get quantum-computers as a new standard), I think there is a good chance to get machines potent enough to outsmart humans. But as I mentioned earlier, I still think the effort to develop the required software is immensely underestimated, and without software even the best computer is only a big chunk of weight.
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday January 23 2015, @08:51PM
We don't need that kind of breakthrough. Increasing parallelism with current technology would suffice. But is there a market for it? Over the last decade mass-market computers seem to have leveled off in performance, while cell phone computers have surged forwards. But cell phones emphasize more low power and portability than performance.
Basically, if the market need for high powered mass market computers appears, then the projection will be correct. Otherwise the same enabling technology will be invested in other directions.
P.S.: Yes, exponential performance always hits a bottleneck. But there are *very* good reasons to believe that there's no inherent problem between here and there. But there may well be marketing problems. One way around this could be if mass market robots take off. (Automated cars are an outside possibility, but I have a doubt that their improvements would result in more powerful user non-auto computers.)
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