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Computers Theorized To Gain Consciousness by 2029

posted by Dopefish on Monday February 24 2014, @02:00AM   Printer-friendly
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?"

 
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  • (Score: 1) by TheLink on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:45AM

    by TheLink (332) on Tuesday February 25 2014, @03:45AM (#6463)
    The first AIs won't necessary be interested in self preservation. The first few creatures might not have been either and it's just the ones that didn't care enough died out.

    Seems like humans don't have enough awareness either - we are doing too many things without being aware of what will happen as a result or we don't even care.

    The Skynet thing is unlikely to happen. Many of the people at the top didn't get to the top and stay there because they let others take control. So I doubt they are going to ever let a Skynet take over everything. What is more likely to happen is these people at the top will use their Skynets to dominate and control most of the resources of the Earth, and eventually they won't need the rest of us anymore, except as toys, warriors and worshippers. Maybe as a reserve DNA pool and "raw material" just in case.

    If we're lucky we'll be kept around as pets and status symbols. But note that pets don't get to vote and are often spayed ;).