What Happens When Machines Become Conscious? :: The Age of Spiritual Machines Technology Essays

What Happens When Machines Become Conscious? Some leading techno-pundits equal Ray Kurzweil believe that machines lead become conscious within our lifetimes. In his book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil writes that calculating machines will, increasingly appear to have their own personalities, evidencing reactions that we kitty provided label as emotions and articulating their own goals and purposes. He goes even just to say that the computers will appear to have their own free will, and have unearthly experiences (Kurzweil 6). This is an astounding prediction, scarce when one that is echoed by many a(prenominal) of todays artificial intelligence (AI) theorists. In this brief discussion, I will bring into focus somewhat of the questions surrounding the topic of adroit computers and consciousness.Whether or not computers will be conscious or spiritual in the future, the fact remains that they are increasingly able to chance upon tasks which were thought only ach ievable by humans, such as acting chess, or even reading printed text aloud to assist the blind. Stanford computer scientist John McCarthy believes that the only reason computers cannot do some tasks as sanitary as humans is that we do not have an actual concord of how we run the problems ourselves. He writes that, whenever people do better than computers on some task or computers use a lot of computation to do as well as people, this demonstrates that the program designers lack understanding of the ingenious mechanisms required to do the task efficiently (McCarthy 2004). This lack of understanding of be mechanisms is apparent in the situation when experts in a field cannot fully explain how they accomplish a complex task, such as acting the saxophone or swinging a golf club, which they may only fully understand on a subconscious level. As wiz researcher Fred Genesee (2000) writes, even the human learning process can be seen as a kind of programming We now think that the o ne-year-old brain is like a computer with incredibly sophisticated hardwiring, but no software. The software of the brain, like the software of desktop computers, harnesses the exceptional touch on capacity of the brain in the service of specialized functions, like vision, smell, and language. only individuals have to acquire or develop their own software in order to harness the processing power of the brain with which they are born. Alas, if only we could find a better way to teach the computer how to solve problems, rather than the current programming methods Kurzweil suggests that in the future we will be able to use detailed, non-invasive scanning of the human brain to replicate a brains structure inside a computer (53).