Kurzweil on Intelligence & Human Machines

The Law of Accelerating returns not only predicts an increase in speed of such development but also an increase in capabilities. By creating intelligent machines, human intelligence is a parallel of the evolutionary process of ôbuilding on itselfö (Kurzweil 1998, 47). The incremental progress of evolution has been enhanced by the product of that process, human intelligence. Despite such advances in intelligent machines, one of the biggest problems with creating human-like machines is defining what is human? Consciousness and sentience are two primary considerations in defining humanness. Various schools of thought, from PlatoÆs deliberations on consciousness to Descartes famous declaration o

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is, I do not believe human intelligence can be recreated in the guise of a machine. In Building New Brains, Kurzweil argues that the slow mammalian neural circuits will one day be imparted to electronic machines that are more versatile and faster than carbon-based neurons (100-101). While this may be possible, I find it applicable only to computation speed and not human intelligence. Too often Kurzweil seems to confuse computation with human intelligence, as if computation is the only skill human intelligence performs. Though a computer can best a human brain in a chess-game, the victory of the computer represents faster and more capable computation but not a higher level of intelligence. Kurzweil insists that we have enough knowledge of the human brain to mimic human intelligence in a computer. Kurzweil (1998) argues that ôwe can tap the architecture, organization, and innate knowledge of the human brain in order to greatly accelerate our understanding of how to design intelligence in a machineö (120). However, this kind of intelligence is really only a matter of faster and more massive computation. Knowledge acquisition is still beyond the realm of any machine, regardless of how much its structure and function mimic the
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Approximate Word count = 2014
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)