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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, @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.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.