[danielbarla]

Honestly, unless the rate of progress of technology changes, the topics you mention will not be machine-less for too long. It's relatively easy to imagine a general artificial intelligence (however far off in the future that may be), that can out-think us on the topics of world peace and ethics. Unless you reject the very possibility of a true general artificial intelligence (or assert some kind of metaphysical superiority of our biological existence), the list of things we're truly best at gets smaller and smaller.

[wiz21c]

It all depends on what AI machine you make. If I take a few artificially created billion neurons and group them into something very close to the brain, then, well I may have made an artificial AI, but it's so close to a human brain that it's not what we currently think of it. Heck, if I want to do that , I just need to have a few moments with someone of the other sex and I may make that machine.

That machine, could indeed think like us.

But if you think programs, neural networks and big data, I'ma afraid we are very far away of anything close to a machine than can think about ethics. Ethics is not a mathematical problem, it has to do with gut feelings, culture, bodies, etc. And I don't see anybody with the smallest idea on how to teach that to a computer, other than in very toyish way (such as a Tamagochi)

[danielbarla]

Currently (and prior to now), most of the research in AI went into immediately usable solutions; I myself ended up doing my MSc in what is effectively optimisation (using certain "AI" techniques), rather than what really interested me (which would have been "real AI"). In a sense, this is correct; we want to have real value out of research investment, so that side of AI will be ahead for a time. Basically, why have something that taught itself to play chess, when we can use a human-engineered heuristic that beats it every time?

That said, this line of thinking is coming under attack on several fronts. AlphaGo is a good example - it's tacking problems where we're not good enough at coming up with heuristics. So, essentially, we've hit a tier where machines are really better at that topic than we are. Think about that for a second; a computer is a better programmer than the best of our guys, and it's early days yet. Not just running computations, but actually determining what computations to run.

Problems like Go are complex enough that if you want to have AI be good at it, you actually need to invest in the meta-level goal creation and other things that go along with it. This is happening on many levels, and researchers are actively trying to understand how exactly the human brain handles these topics (or even what consciousness is, on a practical level).

If you follow these developments to their logical conclusion, I'm pretty sure a "real AI" will be on the cards relatively shortly, whatever that time period may be (100 years is nothing on the grand scale). Initially, this will likely have some architectural similarities to human brains, but will essentially be free to do its own thing and restructure. Eventually, it will have gut feelings and culture that are far beyond what our feeble little brains can comprehend.

[wiz21c]

I like your argument. But somehow, I remain stuck on mine. The nature of AlphaGo is indeed very complex. But to me the question remains : AlphaGo is able to demonstrate skill to play go, and maybe, in the context of the game, than can be called true intelligence. But to know if we are on the path of true (!) AI, we might want to compare AlphaGo and a human intelligence qualitatively. Which we can't. Because we may (I dunno, didn't write it!) not know for sure what AlphaGo actually "guessed" while learning and we know even less about human intelligence...

So I think AI will, as you say, reach more and more goals and we'll go the upper level with more meta stuff. But is this a road that ends on true AI or is there a "conceptual" gap ? I dunno, I think my life would be better if there was such a gap. But that's just because I love humans... Thanks for the conversation :-)