This is the 4th in a series of AI journals for my class at UNH. The third is missing due to my contracting mono a few weeks ago and spending most of my time actively trying not to die. In the course of events I managed to forget about my journal entry. Well, maybe at the end I will throw another on as a bonus.
Anyway, my timely and topical journal entry will revolve around this piece in recent BBC News, As soon as I saw the headline I started to become extremely skeptical. Only twenty-two years to match human thought capability? Then I noticed the quote's originator: Ray Kurzweil. Ah-ha!
Ray is a borderline-manic future-holic. Having read The Singularity Is Near, I would hardly consider him an unbiased source about the future of technology. However, having considered the source, let us give equal thought to what he is saying. I have no doubt that most, if not all, of what he claims will happen will eventually come true. His visions of nanobots and other nanotechnological marvels are almost certainly in the cards, as well as his suggestions of future man-machine symbiosis. I am even a believer in his suggestions that humans will eventually upload their consciousness into a computer system and live immortally as sentient software. But in the next twenty-two years? It seems highly unlikely.
This started me thinking, though. If twenty-two years aren't long enough, what is? I started thinking about the level of change necessary to move from the current level AI is at compared to where it would need to be to be considered human equivalent. Then I considered the length of time it took AI to go from its inception as a concept to what it is today. Even considering that technological progress as an exponential function over time, I still think it will take more than a few decades to get weakly humanlike AI. But who knows? I could be wrong, and Ray could be right. I hope he is! The AI Winter has lasted far too long in my opinion, and here's hoping Spring is just around the corner...
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