LogFAQs > #965916869

quick random thoughts since I have to go to work:

we are making a lot of progress. google's mission supposedly is to create a full AI. and we are getting there. google actually makes TPUs which are basically hardware neural nets.

but to make an actually conscious machine is going to take more than that. you will need to hook up sensory data to something like a TPU, but in the right way. and then you will need more TPUs hooked up to that in other ways for particular purposes. (probably a combination of neurology and computer science is necessary; I wonder if any neurologists work for google).

but there still will be things missing, even if that started to achieve something approaching consciousness.

one is, a machine AI will not be a chemical process, so it will be missing a lot of things that we do with chemicals, (hormones, neurotransmitters, etc.) (maybe there are hardware analogues?)

another is, a machine AI would be missing our evolutionary instincts. it would not have survival or ambition as driving factors (which for some reason everyone seems to think they will).

probably there is at least the one big question left to answer which is basically the "architecture" of what we know as consciousness; how do you setup the neural networks in such a way that it gives rise to a "conscious" system. (and even then... you would get to "lizard brain" before you got to actual consciousness. if you can't build an ant brain out of neural nets then you're not quite there yet.)