"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:28:43 -0800 (PST), jamesgangnc
wrote:

On Feb 27, 10:51 am, Short Wave Sportfishing
wrote:
On Wed, 27 Feb 2008 09:48:53 -0500, "jamesgangnc"
wrote:

Skynet is total science fiction. We are as far from a self-aware
electronic
intelligence as an ape is from a computer.

Yes - and in 1945 Arthur Clark published "Extra-Terrestrial Relays --
Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?" which was the germ
of the idea of today's communications via satellite. I might add that
a lot of folks believed his idea to be fanciful at best and it wasn't
until 1954 when Bell Lab's John Pierce proposed what was to become
Echo and Telstar that expansion of communications into space was
possible.

Consider that up until the late '60s, anything above 700 Mhz was
considered unusable for communications. How'd that work out?

At the current rate of engineering and technical advancements in
computing and processor size, is "Colossus" or Mike from "Moon is A
Harsh Mistress" be far behind?

It's only a matter of time. :)

We don't even have the first clue about how our own self awareness
works.

"I think, therefore I am." - René Descartes :)

All of today's computers are simply huge extensions of the first very
basic logic circuits. They are completely predictable.

Um...well, I guess that's why diagnostic software engineers aren't in
high demand - completely predictable logic should produce complete
predictable results. Right?

And quantum computing isn't that far off - the mathematics is solid,
it's just the engineering that's lagging behind.

Wayne brought up Kasparov and Big Blue - Big Blue is relatively
primitive by today's standards.

Your examples are extensions of existing technology that could, and
were predicted by some.

Technically you could say that satellites were "predicted" during the
19th Century and even earlier, but that would be a stretch to consider
what some thinkers were...well, no other way to put it, thinking. :)

The technology to create self-awareness doesn't exist
because we don't know what self-awareness is.

Not true - self awareness is simple awareness of self - that self
awareness is proof because one exists.

Consciousness is another matter because it requires proof of identity.
However, one has to be conscious if one is self-aware.

Endless loop.

The problem is not so much defining how one defines awareness or even
conscioiusness, but how does one become aware or conscious. That may
be a simple matter of critical mass in that the mere number of nodes
may mimic neural connections.

So it's entirely possible. Maybe not tomorrow or even in the next 50
years, but advances in computing, connectivity and "smart" nodes may
just be the causitive effect.

~~ snip ~~

But mechanical self-awareness, that's so remote from now.

Ah ha!! So you admit that it is possible. :)

I agree with you mostly - in today's terms, it's not likely. Having
said that, we are well on the road to Skynet whether we like it or
not.

As I said, it's just a matter of time.

All your examples are still simply the consequences of the increase in
computer performance. Chess playing computers simply leverage the machine's
much faster ability to examine potential outcomes faster. They track
previous moves by other players to "learn" what to assign the higher
probabilities to. Again, predictable logic. Chess is a game with finite
possible outcomes. Admittedly a very large number of possibilties but
finite never the less. The fact that a computer can become undefeatable in
chess is no different than your ability to never lose to a child in
tic-tac-toe. In the world of cold logical actions, machines will eventually
be superior to us in just about everything. Presently their ability to
interact in the physical world is limited but that will change rapidly.

But there are areas of human behavior that defy logic. We don't understand
those areas. What was going on in Pacasso's mind when he produced a
masterpiece? What is love? Why do we sometimes save another human, even
our enemy, when doing so is completely against our own interests? Leaving
higher dieties out of this, something is going on in our brain that appears
to rise above computational. Is it simply some sort of computational
algorythm that we do not understand yet? If so then maybe machine
intelligence is predictable. But so far it doesn't appear to be explainable
by a computational solution.

But to think that the expansion of computational ability at some point
crosses some magic threshold and becomes intelligence is unsupported by any
theory. There is no reason to predict that outcome and every reason to
think that it will simply be whole lot of computational ability. And a
whole lot of computational ability does not mean one of them will
spontaneously pick up a paint brush or a pencil and create something. Or
decide to kill us.