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: 1) by khallow on Friday January 23 2015, @08:20PM
So, yes, let's discuss and pretend like we have all these other technological hurdles to AI "almost" overcome, and it's just a matter of putting things together in the right way.
What is there to pretend? Humanity already creates new intelligences. We're just figuring out how to do it without requiring a billion years of evolution. It really is just a matter of engineering, putting things together in a right way.