Clever Cogs

August 11, 2014

(The Economist) – Mr Bostrom is, sensibly, not interested in trying to predict exactly when such successes will translate into a machine that is generally intelligent—able to compete with, or surpass, humans in all mental tasks, from composing sonatas to planning a war. But, fantastical as it seems, nothing in science seems to forbid the creation of such a machine. “We know that blind evolutionary processes can produce human-level general intelligence, since they have already done so at least once,” he writes. In other words, unless you believe that there is something magical (as opposed to merely fiendishly complicated) about how the brain works, the existence of humans is proof, in principle at least, that intelligent machines can be built.