Readers of Less Wrong may be interested in this New Scientist article by Noel Sharkey, titled Why AI is a dangerous dream, in which he attacks Kurzweil's and Moravec's "fairy tale" predictions and questions whether intelligence is computational ("[the mind] could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer").
[edit] I thought this would go without saying, but I suspect the downvotes speak otherwise, so: I strongly disagree with the content of this article. I still consider it interesting because it is useful to be aware of differing and potentially popular perspectives on these subjects (and Sharkey is something of a "populist" scientist). I think the opinions it espouses are staggeringly ill-conceived, however.
"[the mind] could be a physical system that cannot be recreated by a computer"
Let me quote an argument in favor of this, despite the apparently near universal consensus here that it is wrong.
There is a school of thought that says, OK, let's suppose the mind is a computation, but it is an unsolved problem in philosophy how to determine whether a given physical system implements a given computation. In fact there is even an argument that a clock implements every computation, and it has yet to be conclusively refuted.
If the connection between physic...
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