The Singularity
Ray Kurtzweil, director of engineering at Google, is another certifiable supergenius who personally created some of the first milestones in AI back in the 1970s. Kurtzweil coined the term Singularity to describe the coming time when computers become better than people at the task of designing computers. He argues that the computer designed by the computer will immediately design a computer that's more powerful yet, and computer intelligence will expand exponentially in a short period of time.
I think he's not being realistic about what constitutes "intelligence". There are aspects of intelligence that are outside the purview of computer capabilities.
Is the Human Brain a Computer?
Back in the 1940s, Alan Turing developed the theory of what a computers is and what it can do, and he proved that a broad class of machines with very different architecture are all equivalent, just slower or faster versions of the same set of capabilities. So much of what has been written about AI, both by computer geeks and philosophers, assumes that the human brain is a computer, with all the power and all the limitations of a Turing Machine.
It's not true.
Human brains can do the things that computers can do, though, compared to computers, they're pretty slow and prone to errors. But our brains do things that computers are not designed to do. We empathize, we intuit, we create, we receive and transmit ideas without knowing where they come from.
Telepathy is part and parcel of our thought process. There is overwhelming experimental evidence for telepathy. Sigmund Freud and WIlliam James, both pioneers of Western scientific psychology, knew about telepathic abilities from their own experience and from their studies. James wrote that the human brain was more akin to a radio receiver than a computer, and that consciousness lives somewhere outside the brain, outside material reality.
Is the brain a quantum computer? Quantum computers as presently conceived and designed seek to operate predictably by minimizing "errors". In fact, all the engineering difficulties that are associated with development of a quantum computer come from the need for computations to take place reproducibly. Quantum computers of this design will be enormously fast Turing machines. The human brain may be a quantum computer of a different ilk, a design that thrives on quantum "uncertainty" as an entry point for consciousness. This is what Stuart Kauffman's findings about superposition states in neurotransmitters suggests to me.
But that's speculation. In any case, it's certainly true that our brains are doing things that no computer of any design presently contemplated can duplicate.
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