Why? Are you thinking of an AI-in-a-laptop? You should think in terms of, say, a whole data center as devoted to a single AI. This is how search engines already work—a single “information retrieval” algorithm, using techniques from linear algebra to process the enormous data structures in which the records are kept, in order to answer a query. The move towards AI just means that the algorithm becomes much more complicated. When I remember that we already have warehouses of thousands of networked computers, tended by human staff, containing distributed proto-AIs that interact with the public … then imminent AI isn’t hard to imagine at all.
The key is in the phrase “much more complicated”. The sort of algorithm that could become a mind would be an enormous leap forward in comparison to anything that has ever been done so far.
Why? Are you thinking of an AI-in-a-laptop? You should think in terms of, say, a whole data center as devoted to a single AI. This is how search engines already work—a single “information retrieval” algorithm, using techniques from linear algebra to process the enormous data structures in which the records are kept, in order to answer a query. The move towards AI just means that the algorithm becomes much more complicated. When I remember that we already have warehouses of thousands of networked computers, tended by human staff, containing distributed proto-AIs that interact with the public … then imminent AI isn’t hard to imagine at all.
The key is in the phrase “much more complicated”. The sort of algorithm that could become a mind would be an enormous leap forward in comparison to anything that has ever been done so far.