

Attempting to Code the Human Brain - petethomas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304851104579361191171330498.html

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erikpukinskis
People think computers will be able to understand what we understand without
experiencing what we experience. I think that's a mistake. A computer without
hands will never see what we see when we watch baseball. A computer without
facial muscles will never see what we see when we see a person cry.

No creature could ever hold a conversation with a human about being a human
without experiencing actual human life. The pooping and the drunkenness and
the boredom and the hand holding and the uncomfortable shoes, and the slipping
on ice--all of it. No amount of reading or looking at photos will create an
understanding equivalent to the one we get from continuous interaction through
a human body embedded the actual world.

Now, you could give a robot all of those experiences, but that AI would run
into exactly the same intelligence challenges that a healthy aging human runs
into. Not the memory loss and all that, but the ideas start to solidify.
Certain things start to see unquestionable. Strange ideas seem like a waste of
time. Some of aging isn't decrepitude, it's just side effects of the pile of
data getting bigger.

Sure, being able to extrapolate more moves into the future (a la Deep Blue)
will lessen some of that. But not all.

AI fantasists act like the limits of human intelligence are all _human_
limits. But some of them are just the limits of intelligence.

I believe the cyborg reality will last a very, very long time. Biological
intelligence will not be killed off until the great slow turning off of lights
that the second law promised us. And at that point the robots won't be spared
either.

