Artificial Intelligence is a Pipe Dream
Of late I've come to the conclusion that AI, Artificial Intelligence, is not a technological marvel that can one day, with enough research, be achieved, but rather a pipe dream that should probably be abandoned along with the idea of perpetual motion.
I've made my career in software and have been at it for over 10 years now. I think I know better than many people I meet that computers are just mechanisms, nothing more. Certainly very complex mechanisms, but mechanisms none the less. The notion from science fiction that the complexity of a computing system can increase to the point where it miraculously becomes self-aware is just that -- a miracle, meaning extremely unlikely to happen even if you believe in miracles. When the computer in the story "wakes up" and becomes self-aware, that is the point where the story crosses the line from science into fiction. I know of no real reason how this could happen, and I think the idea that it could is born of the current level of extreme ignorance of neurology and how the human brain really works. The field of neurology today really is in its infancy. I think it takes the magnitude of the current lack of understanding of the brain and its workings to even make the idea of comparing the human brain to a computer seem plausible. The more we learn about neurology, the less this comparison seems to hold water.
Here is the very long but good article about the Loebner Prize, and Hugh Loebner, that lead me to this conclusion. In telling its tale, this article describes pretty well imho, the state of AI research today, from its high hopes decades ago, to the disappointing state it finds itself in now.
