Is John human?

[Borachio]

or, god forbid, "common sense philosophers"

Of course, there are some people (I might count myself amongst their number - if I could count, that is) who think that the only sense is common sense, and that even philosphers of the first water are simply using their common sense in their every endeavour.

I couldn't possibly comment on this myself, naturally, but I have to ask: if philosophers aren't using common sense, what faculty are they using?

 

[El_Machinae]

Me too, but look how different that is from the usual and straightforward path to AI and robotics. When we design AI, we don't try to copy every feature of the human brain - only those which pay off in intelligent behavior. I suspect that the easier technological path to designing a human-like Data, is not to copy the brain. It's to develop a general purpose AI, then give it human-like goals and "personality" traits.

I suspect there will be a long time between human-like AI behavior which is driven by radically different "neural" architecture, vs. the arrival of truly human-style neural architecture in artificial devices. And by "a long time", I mean that the latter never happens.

Oh, yeah, general AI will be very different from any type of brain augmenting/migration of consciousness. And the general AI will be made first, and then tweaked into being 'humanlike' looooong before we start making AIs based on neural architecture.

Though the human-based AI certainly sits there as a 'Plan B'. If general AI doesn't happen first, we could very easily then get AI based on the human brain. For some values of 'very easily'.