Harumph. As an artificial intelligence researcher, I don't think
> robots are any closer to humanlike consciousness than they were 50 > years ago.
> Note that the study was done by management and public opinion
> consultants, not AI scientists.
> What fundamental breakthrough do these people think is on the horizon?
> "The achievement of artificial intelligence"? That's newspaperspeak,
> not anything you ever actually hear in the AI research community. And
> it seems to be based on 1950s science(-fiction), the notion that there
> is a single, one-dimensional quality called "intelligence" and if you
> achieve it, you have something that can think like a human.
> There's been tremendous progress in robotics and AI, but it hasn't
> been aimed at achieving humanlike consciousness. Why should it be?
> We're building tools, not dolls. An example of an AI success is
> Mapquest automated directions. Another is computer translation of
> human languages. Not to mention hundreds of machines of all types
> that are subtly smarter and safer than they used to be. Forklifts
> that won't run into you, electrocardiographs that issue a tentative > diagnosis ...
I think what you're classifying as robots are more expert systems. You're right though, an expert system for example couldn't know about the missing chain and sign that led to the death of James Kim. Elsewise it could have warned him about it.
Rather than robots, I am much more concerned about ensuring full human
> rights for human beings who are conceived by cloning. Although I
> don't approve of it, there are going to be human clones. They will be
> perfectly normal human beings just like the rest of us.
> Unfortunately, science fiction and popular culture have set people up
> to think of clones as some kind of slaves or sub-human entities with > no rights.
I agree, and what most people don't realize is that nature already creates its own clones. They've been among us forever.