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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 HiThere on Friday January 23 2015, @06:44PM
Variations on Cyborgs are already here, and will clearly integrate more capabilities. That doesn't mean that robots won't also become more capable.
And the argument that "they won't implement a feature because they don't want it" ignores the nature of intelligence, artificial or not. Intelligence is general purpose. What's important is the details of the motivational structure, and *I* at least don't understand that well enough to know what any particular implementation could lead to. (More particularly, I can understand *SOME* of the things that might result, but by no means all.)
It's important to remember that intelligence requires learning. And it's quite difficult to put useful bounds around what can be learned except via limitations on interest. So a "robot uprising" is probably easy to prevent, but this wouldn't keep them from taking over via some other route. And, in fact, I expect them to be pushed into taking over by people. The route that I see is that they will start by learning to become effective advisors, whose advice you are better off taking, and then laziness on the part of people will automate the acceptance of that advice. (Spam filters already censor our emails in this way...but would you want to try without them?)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.