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"Ugh, always worries me when people do this kind of thing. It gives the uninitiated the false impression that there is such a thing as “real” AI."

The enemies of free markets, open societies, free worship, public expression of faith and ultimately free thinking itself have always had a vested interest in reducing the perception of human intelligence to synapses, relays bit and bytes.

Along with fellow travelers in the Humanist movement, atheists like B.F. Skinner have reveled in the notion that man and his society could be reduced to the soulless responses of machine like patterned behavior. The goal of demonstrations such as these is a thinly veiled attempt to push man's conception of himself into that void foreshadowed in Skinner's "Beyond Freedom And Dignity."

Sorry, but I, along with most of the Conservative FRiends I have on this site will keep both - the freedom and the dignity - along with our souls.

The enemies of free markets, open societies, free worship, public expression of faith and ultimately free thinking itself have always had a vested interest in reducing the perception of human intelligence to synapses, relays bit and bytes.

And how's that been working out for them? I recently re-watched the original Tron, on TV. I saw the movie in '82, and liked it, but watching it now had me wondering what I had seen in it. Not only was the technical jargon not used accurately - which, of course, I didn't know when I was a kid - but also the plot was about ten years behind the times. It's as if Disney were preparing 1982's kids for the 1975 version of Rollerball.

It might sound like I'm slagging on Disney, but I'm really not. I'm sure the folks there consulted the best experts...

Will humans be reduced to machines? More likely that AI machines will develop certain human characterisitics, like a dislike of being shoved around.

Agreed. Thing is I’ve created AI, spent countless hours researching it, delving into the intricacies of what AI actually entails. What it means to be intelligent.

At the most boiled down point I was able to reach I realized that there are things a computer can never truly attain.

[rewards and penalties], [likes and dislikes], [wants and needs].

Without these, even the most simplistic mind becomes impossible. You can program the brain of a 2 year old if you spend enough time putting all of that logic into a program, but how does that brain learn to, say, read? Why does it *care* to read? Does it feel success or failure based on how quickly it learns?

Nope, nor will it. It will always be fake and simplistic, limited by the creativity of the person creating it. We will never create a digital replication of “human” and certainly not “super human” because we’re more complex than we understand ourselves to be and are limited by our own understanding of what it means to *be* human. The best you will ever get is a semi-convincing replication of a given behavior, or set of behaviors.

I could probably create AI that would learn to read a book (by comparing its results to the known content), then learn to vocalize it to you (by comparing its output to the known content), but that’s all the AI would be able to do. It wouldn’t be able to tell you whether the book was good or not, it would just be able to read the book to you. And let’s not even talk about trying to get it to add emotion to the reading.