[HillOBeans]

Mitch Kapor and Kurzweil have a $20,000 bet on whether or not any "machine intelligence" will have passed the Turing Test by 2029. Kurzweil, obviously, is on the "for" side. Kapor's taking the "against" side stems from his experience as a software developer. I think he has a point: consider how incredibly difficult it is to give any machine a set of instructions that will get it to do EXACTLY what you want it to do. The promises of new languages, frameworks, and methodologies have all failed to magically make software easy and bug-free. At some level, a machine intelligence is going to need some sort of software. We like to call the game engines we play against "AI"s, but are they really intelligent? In the end they are just rules engines. It IS fun to dream, and those dreams can certainly lead to technological advances and progress, but as someone who spends much of my days attempting to coerce a machine into understanding what I need it to do, I also share Kapor's skepticism. I think Kapor himself said it best: "In the end, I think Ray is smarter and more capable than any machine is going to be."

[akkartik]

Perhaps you don't need perfectly designed code, just the right kind of selection pressure? Consider the spaghetti that is our DNA or brain structure. YAGNI design might well be a poor fit for the fractal redundancy necessary for truly complex systems.

[HillOBeans]

I am aware that there are already some programs that are capable of "learning", and you could certainly say that they are selecting the correct paths based on trial-and-error, and "remembering" in order to build faster and more accurate responses. I don't pretend to understand how human brains are wired, but I don't really view DNA as "spaghetti". It is code. Wonderfully designed TERNARY code integrated into a system complete with an interpreter and built-in code cloning, error-checking and correction. We humans have yet to design something that works so efficiently. We still suffer from errors in the code, though - mutations that cause such things as CF, Downs, Sickle-Cell, etc.

I suppose it is really the brain one would seek to emulate if they were trying to create some form of true AI.

[akkartik]

Yes it's dangerous to draw from examples that we don't understand the workings of. But all the evidence seems to indicate that brains and DNA don't pay much attention to parsimony or micro-optimization. Or high-level architecture. Or modularity. Nature just does what works.