The Great A.I. Awakening
The author gets it close to right when he talks about Google Maps as a form of AI, and the notion of raising the bar.<p>What&#x27;s missing in this article as well as most reporting on AI is the differentiation between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness, otherwise known as individuality or self awareness.<p>To me there&#x27;s a whole smoke and mirrors phenomenon going on in the AI topic, especially the idea of &quot;emerging AI&quot;, and the supposed potential danger that poses, and it&#x27;s tied to the tendency we have as humans to anthropomorphize inanimate objects, and to believe in supernatural effects.<p>That tendency allows the idea of artificial self awareness to always float behind the scenes in these conversations, and let&#x27;s normal reporting on AI be magically conflated with a different topic.<p>It&#x27;s important to realize that AI is nowhere near self awareness, or conscious, or &quot;awake&quot; and won&#x27;t be no matter how far the field and implementation goes. No matter how many Turing Test they pass, intelligent machines will be no more conscious or self-aware than the Mechanical Turk!<p>That&#x27;s because solving the problem of self-awareness, or consciousness is a different engineering challenge than solving problems of AI. Consciousness is a more complicated, and specialized a thing.<p>Were we to build an artificial self-awarene machine we would not expect it to pass a Turing Test. Instead we might expect different things of it and ask different questions to determine if it is self aware: can it adapt and survive without human help, ie can it trap and store energy and reproduce itself, and what purpose does it find for itself is what objective does it pursue ...<p>These are things machines are capable of as well, but as I said: it&#x27;s a different engineering challenge than producing information that is organized to be sensible to human mind, which is the AI challenge, and the Turing Test.<p>That isn&#x27;t to say machine learning isn&#x27;t potentially dangerous, on the scale of atomic weapons or greater, especially in conjunction with automation, however the idea of an artificially emergent consciousness wth intelligence greater than our own is hogwash: we would do better to pay attention to our own emergent lack-of-intelligence systems and worry about them taking over first.