Dev.SN

Computers Theorized To Gain Consciousness by 2029

posted by Dopefish on Monday February 24 2014, @02:00AM   
from the i-for-one-welcome-our-new-computer-overlords dept.

kef writes:

"By 2029, computers will be able to understand our language, learn from experience and outsmart even the most intelligent humans, according to Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil says:

Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity. So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I'm doing at Google is to try to go beyond what Watson could do. To do it at Google scale. Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages. Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading. It's doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn't understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn't understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying.

Skynet anyone?"

• Re:it always comes down to: Re:it always comes down to: (Score: 1) by githaron on Monday February 24 2014, @11:04AM

  by githaron (581) on Monday February 24 2014, @11:04AM (#5843)

  Well, if we were able to create a truly altruistic, highly intelligent, and nearly unbiased entities that could absorb and process several orders of magnitude more information than humans and thereby give them the ability to make more informed decisions, people might actually welcome our new robotic overlords.

  Parent

• Re:it always comes down to: (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday February 24 2014, @01:58PM

  by VLM (445) on Monday February 24 2014, @01:58PM (#5996)

  We've tried that by spoiling our biological descendents rotten, and all we got was dirty hippies, woodstock, an outsourced economy based solely on financial bubbles, disco, and lots of drug use. And that was after a bazillion generations of experience raising and trying to spoil our own kids, while running millions of experiments in parallel nothing really interesting happened.

  I suspect human created AI will look a hell of a lot more like woodstock or jonestown than some tired old scifi trope.

  Parent