[MD] Quality Conversations

[HAMILTON PRIDAY]

dmb said:
> Hubert Dreyfus says that artificial intelligence will never work.
> He teaches Heidegger at Berkeley now, but started out in the
> sciences at MIT.  He has the very tough job of trying to explain
> to the IT community that they are working with certain metaphysical
> assumptions that lead them to error. ... They're typical SOM scientists.

Ian replied:
> Agreed - AI "will never work" until it is realised that life has to evolve
> before intelligence .... and then it's not artificial any more, simply 
> real.

Krimel replied:
> I would say it is way to early do discount AI. Moore's law is still
> ticking away and machine capacities continue to accelerate.
> It is impossible to say what capabilities inorganic intelligences
> will have in 20 or 30 years much less 100 years. ...But it is ridiculous
> to assume that philosophical analysis can declare anything to be
> technologically impossible.

Leave it to an objectivist to put technology before metaphysical truth. 
Dreyfus is right, of course.  A machine, regardless of how complex or 
sophisticated its design and processing capability, is not a cognizant 
being.  The notion that Science will eventually produce a conscious machine 
overlooks the fact that intelligence is information, not consciousness.  You 
can no more put consciousness into an electro-mechanical device than you can 
transform it into a living organism.  I am appalled that such illogical 
thinking surfaces in a purportedly "enlightened" philosophy forum, let alone 
the AI community.

--Ham