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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Everything hinges on his belief: "I believe that it is impossible for human beings to create a human-equivalent artificial intelligence."

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?

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Deeper than that, everything hinges on defining intelligence as what is solvable/not solvable in theory given infinite resources (time etc). So any process that can blindly enumerate all solutions to a problem (no matter how often some wrong solutions might be repeated) is just as "intelligent" as if it could solve the problem in constant or log* or whatever time. This has the interesting result of us being by definition intelligently designed, since the random mutation / natural selection process is maximally intelligent (can result in solutions (possibly through an unbounded number of intermediates such as humans) to any problem that has a solution).

Clearly, a practical definition of intelligence needs to include time. Otherwise, any problem whose solution can be described as a number and quickly checked could eventually be solved by a counter.

I agree with you. Also, I don't believe humans aren't limited by the same issues that machines have. Halting problem comes to mind, nothing shows that humans aren't bound by it too. I believe (another belief ;p ) that theoretically machines can be as intelligent as human considering that were both bound by the same limits. But I'm no AI expert as my post will probably prove. IANAAIE

Are you suggesting that the human brain may be capable of non-Turing computing (hypercomputation)? I certainly don't agree with that.

not sure about hypercomputation but Godel did try to prove that humans had intuition something that would allow them to somehow go beyond the limitation of his incompleteness theorem. Of course he did go crazy thinking about all this and he never did finish his proof about intuition. I personally don't believe it's possible. Humans are as limited as machines.

> I don't believe humans aren't limited by the same issues that machines have. Halting problem comes to mind, nothing shows that humans aren't bound by it too.

Math has started, quite a while ago, to show that we are already probing some sort of inherent limits of knowledge for the human mind.

> theoretically machines can be as intelligent as human

Intelligence is the easy problem. It's just a function of complexity after all. It's consciousness / awareness that's harder, more important and more interesting.

Even if that were true, we could still see rather drastic advances emulating intelligence far below the capability of humans.

Imagine if we could program a self replicating machine group similar to an ant colony? Self propagating, powering, healing. Any excess resources the colony has goes into building our houses, growing our food, building cars etc...

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