EDGE: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

The Edge is a great site, their motto is "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves".  At the end of each year they publish a question and answers from some of the most influential thinkers of our time.  Last year's question touched on one of my fave topics...AI!

The responses they publish are varied enough that you see arguments/points of view from pretty much all sides of the issue. My own view is that this is yet another area of human conceit that will eventually be overturned (think back to the Sun revolving around the Earth issue...where we literally thought we were the center of the Universe haha).  What non-experts don't usually realize is that computers (even Super Computers) had a computational capacity far far less than humans for so long that when AI (e.g. machine learning) programs ran on them it was never going to be a fair contest.  Even now, by the best estimates (from Computational Neuroscientists etc) our fastest Super Computer is ~1000x slower than the avg. human mind!  But in narrow tasks, even ones now that are not so much about number crunching (like the game of GO) AI can beat the best humans on the planet!

https://www.edge.org/contributors/q2015

I'll leave off by paraphrasing my fave Future guru Ray Kurzweil, he says one reason why most people have trouble believing in his timelines (his biggest prediction is that The Singularity will occur by 2045) is that they have not been trained to think exponentially, instead the default state is to think linearly which is good enough for most day-to-day experiences but not for appreciating the pace of science & tech. He has a great metaphor/puzzle for this, imagine a pond that on day 1 has only 1 lilly pad, if we assume they double daily and that on day 30 the pond is 100% full then on what day was it only 1/4 full?  The answer of course is 28, just work backwards...on day 29 it was half full!  The point is the doubters would be looking to be in the right (that the pond will never be overrun with lilly pad's) all the way till around day 28!

PS  So many Movies and TV shows now are based on these topics, I highly recommend these below!
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/her

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/ex-machina

http://www.metacritic.com/tv/humans

http://www.metacritic.com/tv/westworld