Re: nanotech?

Wayne wrote:

> It's not that I don't believe that consciousness could
> be put in a robot. I like Azimov's SF, but I think
> he was over come by the wonders of technological
> advancement in that period. They were all very new
> and fresh, and no one really understood their limits.
> We still have a very long way to go to get to a Hal
> 9000. It's not just a matter of more power, more
> memory, etc. It's something more fundamental than
> that.
>

Not all people agree with this view (though I think I do). Proponents
of "Strong AI" (e.g. Douglas Hofstadter of "Godel, Escher and Bach"
fame, Prof. Igor Aleksander of Imperial College London, and Ray
Kurzweil) contend that intelligence and conciousness will be
obtainable via an algorithm & hence it really is just a question of
getting a powerful enough computer. Such people believe that
consciousness would be an "emergent property" of a sufficiently large
neural network, which is nothing more than an algorithm that can run
on a computer.

I've seen Aleksander give a lecture at a neural networks conference
where he claimed that some neural net simulations he performed on his
Mac were exhibiting behaviour akin to consciousness, but I can't say I
was convinced by the writhing pixels on the screen.

Others, such as Roger Penrose ("The Emperors New Mind") argue that an
algorithm can never be conscious, and there is indeed something more
fundamental (Penrose postulates something to do with quantum gravity).
 The other view is called "Weak AI" - we may build intelligent
machines, but it will require more than conventional computers and
software.

What I find curious is that both Hofstadter (Hard AI) and Penrose
(Soft AI) bring Godel's theorem in to assist their arguments.

Iain.
Received on Tue Mar 29 15:53:25 2005