[benkant]

Ignoring the singularity talk because I think it's become meaningless, but Jürgen Schmidhuber would disagree with the conclusion that machines can't be creative, or at least that it's beyond algorithms.

He has a formal theory of creativity [0] which claims to explain, among other things, music, humour, beauty [1] and fun. It centres around compression and Kolmogorov complexity.

There's a great video in the first link.

These are hard problems, but it's shortsighted to consider it impossible for us to build machines with approximate behaviour. Often with this class of criticism you'll have arguments along the lines of "sure the submarine moves through the water, but is it swimming?" Apologies to Dijkstra.

[0] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html [1] http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/beauty.html