"Chris L Peterson" wrote in message
...

On Fri, 9 May 2014 17:14:38 +0100, "Lord Androcles"
wrote:

That depends on how you define "human", "life", "intelligence". If we
create
artificially intelligent robots they will be as much our children as the
biological kind, but without the failings of emotional hang-ups. Humans
will
have evolved. In that sense humans will someday leave the Solar system.

Yes. But I think the fact that we don't observe such things strongly
argues for the position that technological intelligence is
self-limiting and short lived.

================================================== ===
It's early days. Not so long ago we used large animals to do our muscle work
for us; we replaced those with steam engines, tractors and shovels, then
diesel engines, and now we have adding machines to replace clerks who did
our accounting for us. We've only just scratched the surface of what a
computer is capable of. The breakthrough in AI will come when a computer has
access to an expert system and designs its own learning programs. Today we
can not only write a program to play tic-tac-toe and never lose, we can
write a program that LEARNS to play tic-tac-toe by trial and error, as a
child does. I know this because I've done it, the machine plays every
combination their is, in a tree, then clips any branches that lead to a
loss. Intelligence is the ability to adapt what we already know in a strange
situation. We knew birds could fly and needed wings, so the Wright brothers
built wings, but technological flight was self-limiting and short lived ...
until it improved.

-- Lord Androcles, Zeroth Earl of Medway