Artificial Intelligence

I am writing some general thoughts (for CNN International) about my belief in the eventual development of genuinely intelligent machines. I have little doubt that this will happen, and I suspect it will happen within my lifetime. I do not believe that machine intelligence will suddenly emerge, but that it will incrementally develop just as biological intelligence struggled to evolve in fits and starts through the evolutionary tree. That said, there are resons to believe that there may be a distinct threshold above which intelligence can be clearly manifested. Even humans took a long time to capitalize on the biological wetware (our brains) once it evolved -- it appears there was a long period in which human behaviour was only incrementally distinginguishable from that of their biological predecessors, and the intelligence we identify with sprang up partly as a cultural phenomenon in the last several tens of thousands of years (see "The Dawn of Human Culture").

In fact. many of what were once the benchmarks for intelligence have been reached or surpassed by machine systems: arithmetic, the game of checkers, therom proving, checkers, planning, basic visual processing and speech understanding (not language understanding). So far, this just means that our original benchmarks were too simple, but it also suggests that computer systems are gradually encroaching on what it means to be intelligent.

How will the advent machine intelligence make us feel? Well, how do we feel about the fact that long division (which was once the sole province of the intellectual elite) can be better performed by disposable calculators? My own comments need to wait for another day. Alan Kay, however, has a nice comment on this:
"Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower." (I organized a visit by Alan here to McGill a few years ago. I think he has a policy of making pithy epigrammatic statements.)