Scarily good AI

[Kingstepper]

A computer is a tool, simple as. No matter how cleverly it "appears" to mimic sentient life, it just isn't and never will be. At the very extreme it can manipulate code, and build a database, but its core code has to be put there in the first place - and that has to be by someone. Life it isn't.

I work with computers day in, day out, and the current operating systems are very clever, as are many applications. But under the hood a computer is a simply a dimwit box capable of doing absolutely nothing for itself.

Don’t agree that computers will never be sentient, they can evolve as we have. After all, we evolved from not a lot.

Unless coming from a perhaps religious viewpoint don’t see there’s anything special about us that couldn’t be mimicked in software.

[M4tt]

Don’t agree that computers will never be sentient, they can evolve as we have. After all, we evolved from not a lot.

Unless coming from a perhaps religious viewpoint don’t see there’s anything special about us that couldn’t be mimicked in software.

You said it yourself- 4.5 billion years of physical evolution that makes a human body a solid mass of processing in an intimate dance with the environment that would kill it in a trice. Not to mention however billion years of interaction with other bodies doing the same dance, not to mention all the 'software' added in when we developed symbolic language games. That's a lot to mimic. Of course there might be other routes, but then we start with no map.