The problem is that consciousness is actually a spiritual manifestation, and not purely physical. The brain that they’re so focused upon is only the physical mechanism that allows our spirit to interact with the physical world. Their belief is like thinking that the ventriloquist’s dummy is actually alive and conscious, and that if they only figure out the right grade of wood to use they can make one that is alive and can think and talk even without a ventriloquist behind it.
But just as the wooden dummy only presents the illusion that it is alive, so too does “AI” only present an illusion that it is intelligent and aware of its surroundings. AI will get better at this mimicry as computer processors continue to get faster with more parallel architecture, but it will never reach a point at which it can safely react to all of the randomness that occurs in the world, not even when limited to those things that can happen while driving a car. Sure, most of the time, even today, it can do a good job of driving (even better than humans at times), but when it inevitably fails it will fail spectacularly, and at those moments it will fail so badly that it will almost always have been better to have had a human in control. The reason is that no amount of programming can anticipate every possible situation, while human consciousness and intelligence can sort those situations out in ways that we still don’t completely understand. We often do things intuitively, especially in a crisis, that don’t make strict logical sense or that are based upon an incomplete picture of the world. The computer’s downfall is that it ALWAYS follows a logical sequence according to its programming, which sometimes dooms it to failure, along with any human whose life is depending upon its decision making.
Good comment.
” The computer’s downfall is that it ALWAYS follows a logical sequence”
The human mind’s downfall is that it often doesn’t follow a logical sequence.