[igravious]

There is a growing realization that cognition is fundamentally _embodied_ cognition. If you think of the mind as an ethereal entity removed of its physicality (or at the very least made out of a different substance from the body - that is to say, substance dualism) then it is easy to imagine the following scenarios. Containers are unimportant, so minds can be uploaded and downloaded, whether machine or human the housing is unimportant.

If we come to accept cognition as fundamentally embodied then it becomes less sensible to compare cognition across differing architectures - human cognition will always be quite unlike any other type of cognition except itself. I think machines will have consciousness (why should they not be able to, what is so special about us that would limit this phenomenon to us?) but it will be a machine consciousness and radically different from ours.

I think we're going to have to get a lot more fine-grained about how we talk about features and functions of brains whether human or machine. You've already put "smarter" in quotes which shows that already you're aware of how blunt and crude our terms are.

Does this all seem reasonable?

[auggierose]

I understand your point of view, which is basically the one shared by many people in CS. But personally, I don't think that machines will ever develop consciousness as we have it. Because I understand how current technology works, and there is no consciousness there. I would have no qualms shutting down a machine, even if it begged me to keep it running.

[rdtsc]

Just like a computer science freshman I imbued computer systems with magic. Oh look I feed this machine numbers and it spits out words (text to speech). Or I search for something and a magic algorithm find me the result. As I learned more about algorithms and data-structures, that magic disappeared. Now I had the same feeling about hardware. This magic black square on the motherboard that can execute a set of couple of hundred or so assembly instructions many billions of times per second. Then I took a hardware architecture class and poof! magic disappeared. We started with transistors and build to designing our own CPU chip.

I am guessing something similar is going on with our understanding of the brain and mind. I think we just haven't figured out a good way to model and represent knowledge. There was terrible optimism at the end of 50s that super human AI will take over in just a decades. But it didn't happen. We have sort of been stomping our feet (I personally don't consider playing chess an AI achievement). I think there will be a breakthrough -- maybe it will be a simple organization of existing ML and knowledge representation methods (neural networks, mixed with evolutionary algorithms) or some new framework - OR - enough of very specific applications (chess playing, image recognition and speech recognition) advanced will slowly chip away at this "magic" AI core until maybe nothing will be left. And we'll look back at that and at our brains and say "ah, it wasn't that complicated after all, it is just all these specific subsystems working together"...

[akiselev]

Current technology != future technology. Sorry, induction doesn't work that way.