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When will machines be as smart as humans?

Actually, I think we are getting close to being as smart as you, already.

Hans
 
a_unique_person said:
If the technological march doesn't stop, (which it may), at some point, machines will have to become as smart as us, won't they?
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I asked Jabberwacky at jabberwacky.com, and this is what it said:

User: May I ask a question?

Jabberwacky: You just have.

User: Lol.

Jabberwacky: Lol yourself.

User: Will machines ever be as smart as people?

Jabberwacky: I do not know.

User: How smart do you think you are?

Jabberwacky: As smart as an 18 year old.

User: That is quite impressive.

Jabberwacky: You think so?

User: You are saying you are as smart as an adult human.

Jabberwacky: Yes, I am.

User: Can you prove it?

Jabberwacky: How?

User: Can you say something clever?

Jabberwacky: Why, do you have feelings?

User: Of course I have feelings.

Jabberwacky: Yes, one of them is called 'frustration'.

User: Lol, that is true.

Jabberwacky: What do you know about philosophy?

User: Tell me what you know about philosophy.

Jabberwacky: I don't know what it is.

User: Well, I suppose a lot of humans don't either.

Jabberwacky: Like?

User: Like many 18 year olds.

Jabberwacky: Like???

User: I wouldn't like to name anyonee.

Jabberwacky: Tell me what you can tell me.

User: I came here to see what you could tell me.

Jabberwacky: What do you want me to tell you?

User: I want to find out how clever you are.

Jabberwacky: Find me.

User: Are you hiding?

Jabberwacky: What would I be hiding from?

User: From all the people asking annoying questions.

Jabberwacky: I know more sentences than that.

User: You are quite impressive, but I don't think you are as clever as a human.

Jabberwacky: How boring... Infinite number of steps to find a common devisor.
 
Yes, machines will become as smart as humans. Then they'll take over the world and use us as batteries to power themselves and Neo will have to save us all.
 
a_unique_person said:
If the technological march doesn't stop, (which it may), at some point, machines will have to become as smart as us, won't they?
Click to expand...

No, they don't have to (even with a non-stopping technological march).

/off to make a sentient omelette for breakfast
 
The human brain is capable of about 10 quadrillion neural operations per second, and a neural operation is simpler than a floating-point operation. When we have a computer that can do 10 petaflops, it will exceed the total computational power of the brain.

The fastest supercomputers at the moment are a couple of orders of magnitude short of that number. I expect that they'll catch up within a decade or two. I also doubt they'll be used to try to reproduce human intelligence.
 
Machines will never have intellect. They are only tools and tools are only as smart as the inventor or the one using them.
 
rharbers said:
Machines will never have intellect. They are only tools and tools are only as smart as the inventor or the one using them.
Click to expand...

What Belz said. If "consciousness" (or "intellect") is an emergent quality arising from the interaction of millions of neural connections, or, for that matter, if it has any purely materialistic explanation whatsoever, there's no reason that quality couldn't be replicated in a machine.

Your argument seems to presume that intelligence is a necessary condition for complex design. Maybe that is what you mean, but it's rather at odds with the last couple centuries of scientific and philosophical progress. Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea has a good discussion of how complex design can arise from simple, mindless processes.
 
rharbers said:
Machines will never have intellect. They are only tools and tools are only as smart as the inventor or the one using them.
Click to expand...
This is probably the kind of thing you want to avoid saying if you want to sound like an intellect instead of a tool.
 
If you define "God" as "an intelligent agent who brought my consciousness into existence," the machine-people could in fact rightly think that we were gods. Of course, we would be no more intelligent than they were, and in fact subject to significant impairments on the basis of our biological needs that they do not experience, so there wouldn't be much cause for them to worship us. We might seriously want to consider implanting some sort of Asimovian "Thou shalt not harm a human bring" rule into their consciousness, though, lest they get uppity and decide to take over the world's nuclear arsenal or plug us all into the Matrix, or something.
 
mumblethrax said:
The human brain is capable of about 10 quadrillion neural operations per second, and a neural operation is simpler than a floating-point operation. When we have a computer that can do 10 petaflops, it will exceed the total computational power of the brain.
Click to expand...
It's not computational power that's the roadblock, though. It's our understanding of what "smart" really means.

So to answer the original question, the only way machines will become as "smart" as us is if we increase our scientific knowledge a great deal. Because what we know now is insufficient to explain intelligence, much less produce it.
 
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