Why there will never be human-equivalent AI

That says nothing about whether or not the SYSTEM on a WHOLE understands Chinese. Given the constraints of Searle's example (that every input produces a 'correct' output, but does so via this labour-intensive process), it seems there IS intelligence going on there at the SYSTEM level.

Ultimately, the point of that story is saying 'the cpu isn't smart'. Fine, that's not the argument behind AI/PI. And the whole 'there's nothing going on that isn't in the person already' also misses the point: what if, instead of a slow human translating, we had a fast human doing the lookups at the magnitude of a trillion lookup operations per second? They'd be able to do substantially more 'translating' work than the author of the software. So now, say that we program 'learning' instead of 'translation'. Sweet, now the computer can't learn any BETTER than the human, but it can learn FASTER, and there may be some substantial benefit to that.

His own argument is self-refuting: "in fact it was doing exactly what I had told it to do and nothing which I couldn't have done myself longhand given the time." Right. But you're limited by death, and a computer isn't limited in the same way. So say AI never makes it to 'smarter than human given enough time'. Fine. If it does in 30 seconds what it would take me 17,000 years to complete, I'm pretty happy.

The FAR more interesting question (to me) and probably one that can't be solved until we 'get there' is this: will computer intelligence be subject to the same foibles and hangups as a human? So, for instance, could "Google AI" respond to my search request by saying, "Wow, what a boring question, stop bothering me."

  Lesser intelligences cannot create greater
  intelligences... dumb luck notwithstanding.

In other words, since "dumb luck" can optimize a fitness function that results in intelligence, why can't that same (or some similar) fitness function be optimized a little less dumbly, like using human intelligence to navigate the through the solution space?

That proves there is a natural process by which greater intelligence can be created.

Therefore there is no reason that an even greater intelligence cannot be created with help from man. And for singularity's sake super-human intelligence doesn't even have to be an AI. Genetically-engineered super-intelligent primates would do the trick as well. The idea is that once you've created something smarter than yourself, not matter how you did it, it will then be able to figure out how to make something even smarter. And so on. That's the singularity.

I agree that it's difficult to give formal specifications for a "human-equivalent artificial intelligence," but assuming the human brain is an entirely physical object, why shouldn't we be able to at least theoretically create or simulate a computer system with as much complexity and the same functionality?

I've long pointed out that human brains are far more complex than computers. However given Moore's law it seems likely that somewhere in the 2015-2030 range (depending on how one defines the complexity of a neuron), computers will be a match for human brains in complexity. At some point after that happens I expect human level AI to appear.

The growing power of statistical techniques for previously impossible tasks like translation and answering Jeopardy questions (see the computer IBM is putting together) suggests that once the requisite CPU power is available, it won't take long for computers to match humans on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. Once you hook together the right selection of abilities, I expect something that looks suspiciously like original thought to emerge.

1. An atomic-level scan of a single human being.

2. A computer with program powerful enough to simulate all the atoms in a single human being and their interactions.

If you can get this, you have a computer as smart as a human (modulo quantum effects, if those do indeed play any part in cognition.

This would be a horribly inefficient way of doing it but I'd be very surprised if it were not possible to get a computer this fast in real life, or to conduct an approximated atomic level scan of a human being. It may not happen soon, but it would be truly shocking to me if it doesn't happen eventually, provided we do not destroy ourselves before reaching that technological level.

Even badly written code will be able to execute at speeds we can't fathom today. Every dot in an image will be able to be analyzed in milliseconds, matched to terabytes of stored patterns. Every sound wave in a voice analyzed by the same massive amount of power and patterns.

We may not have "real" AI in 100 years like in the movies but it will be a spooky close simulation.

I just don't know what will happen with power storage, we'd need a huge leap, the simple evolutions in battery chemistry so far are just not enough.

'Real AI' may require new hardware like quantum computers, and may take a very long time, but even 400 years ago, did anyone expect us to be sending small robotic vehicles around and out of the solar system?

I do believe that real AI will happen, but it may seem very alien to us.

"Clearly intelligence is already an infinite-dimensional beast"

Pure fluff. This author seems to have no more than a layman's appreciation of AI. He's also either prone to hyperbole or unaware of the illogic/fluffiness of such statements, or both.

I do believe humans could build a fusion reactor so a computer with expert level knowledge in all areas related to fusion reactors could build one thousands of times faster that it would take a human to do. So anything you think a human could do a high-level AI could do dramatically faster. So even if the AI could never construct something smarter than itself, it could make something faster, and in turn that AI could make one even faster. That is the singularity.

Yes.

1. Figure out what the brain does chemically to create thought.

2. Replicate that function electronically.

Responses to his objections about complexity greater than ourselves: If we can't create something smarter than ourselves, then how did amoeba do it? If you can figure out step #1 then you can also diff a smart brain vs a dumb one. Take whatever makes a brain smarter and double it in step #2.

IMHO hardware's not the problem. It's reverse engineering the software our brains use. I expect when we figure this out, we'll be suprised how simple we really are.

Whether a technological singularity is desirable is debatable. Whether development of human-equivalent AI would lead to technological singularity is debatable. On the other hand, human-equivalent AI seems inevitable to me. Author asserts some things without much in the way of proof:

"You could take a precise reading of the structure of the human's brain and simulate that brain inside a computer. But taking this initial reading is impossible in practice right now, and may remain so indefinitely, and computers need to be, conservatively, ten orders of magnitude more powerful before the simulation step becomes possible."

Why would this remain impossible in practice indefinitely? It's only a matter of time and effort until the human brain's goings-on can be reproduced outside a human brain, no matter how many orders of magnitude "more powerful" thee equipment needs to be. Unless there is truly some human-inaccessible spiritual process that goes on alongside physical processes in the human brain to produce human intelligence, there's no reason purely physical processes can't be reproduced outside a human brain.

This is like saying that no computer is more powerful than any other computer, given sufficient storage and time. But limits on storage and time are THE limits. This is a very poor way to define "power".

For example: Evolutionary programming, Iterative design, Gödel Machines. All of them possible approaches.

1. it's not a well defined quantity.

2. under any definition, it doesn't seem to be anything useful in itself.

can some entity create an entity better at a task that the creator? obviously yes. c.f., compilers, factories, cranes, &c.