| UserName | Title | Description | Update |
| JohnnyCNote | Emotions | For many years I could never accept the idea of machines (i.e. computers, etc.) gaining sentience and their own consciousness. After much reading and thought I finally realized the answer was staring me in the face the whole time: emotions.
What many proponents of the human/machine singularity tend to overlook is the fact that humans have emotions. Emotions are what make people irrational and defy logic. How can a machine be programmed to like the color blue, fear heights and crave chocolate? These emotions have nothing to do with rational thought and their source is somewhere else (at least in a different part of the brain).
How can someone explain why s/he finds The Three Stooges to be hilarious but thoroughly dislikes Abbot and Costello? Or why does someone love football and hate baseball, and someone else dislikes all sports and prefers pro wrestling?
It will take a very long time until a machine can achieve true emotions, if ever . . . |
Saturday, September 1, 2012
9:24 PM
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| PBW | human/machine 'singularity' | I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who thought the Singularity was far fetched. It’s an interesting thing to talk about but I agree with the other sentiments here. If you got there by inventing something that rapidly evolves by itself that’s a little scary to me! |
Thursday, October 27, 2011
2:08 PM
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| Bill_J62 | the singularity | Ray Kurzweil gets a lot of headlines with his predictions but nobody that I’ve talked to in the computer industry agrees with him. It would take a radical discovery that no one has heard of yet. |
Thursday, October 20, 2011
4:22 PM
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| DMcFarland | The Singularity | 2045 is just 34 years from now. I don’t see it happening. Even sophisticated systems like Apple’s Siri voice recognition in the iPhone 4s is just a mathematical comparison of digital patterns. There isn’t any understanding of the semantics of the commands that the device receives. |
Monday, October 17, 2011
9:37 PM
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| DigitalHead | Paul Allen vs. Ray Kurzweil on singularity | I read Paul Allen’s Technology Review article (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/27206/) and he sounds like a voice of sanity on this subject. I think Kurzweil is confusing transistors with neurons. There’s no comparison. Current computers have no self-awareness or cognizance. They don’t really “think”, they just perform binary logic based on input and instruction code written by human intelligence. |
Monday, October 17, 2011
1:56 PM
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