Terminator Salvation : Understanding the human conciousness.
"I think therefore I am". Or am I? Does the fact that I am concious and have some kind of "experience" of what is around me, mean that I actually exist?
A robot can have an "experience", but at what point would you say the robot is actually concious?
Facets of what I would call "intelligence":
1) Memory
2) Creativity
3) Logic
4) Intuition
5) (I can't believe I almost forgot the most important facet....) Common Sense
In the trailer to the up and coming terminator film it seems like the directors are exploring this very question. If a robot has the same level of "awareness" as a human being, is that robot really a living entity?
What I am so excited about is the whole idea of a program (which I believe we will one day have) that will be able to have the above intellectual facets that a human has. One of the biggest hurdles to date in terms of being able to produce such a robot that I would deem as "intelligent" is the ability of the robot's hardware to process data at the same speed as the human brain. Our senses are monitored by the brain and input is processed at such a speed that reacting to this input is almost and sometimes purely instinctual. Instinct could also be viewed as a form of memory.
I believe, should the human race survive it's technological adolescence and overwhelming greed, we could one day develop such an intelligence that will boost our level of technology immensely. Currently AI programs are still unfortunately very primitive only have the ability to perform the absolute basics. While hardware exists that support the Memory and Logic facets, we suffer dearly through the inability to process the massive amounts of input quickly, and create "learning mechanisms".
The final solution to a great AI will have the following 2 attributes (in my opinion!):
1) It will be modelled against the way the human brain currently works.
2) It will be built using a higher level programming language, very likely a language that works on recursion. This could even be likened to some of the functional languages we have today, which just coincidentally lend themselves very well to concurrent behavior! This recursive behavior will allow the program to infinitely recurs through an information tree, altering itself and storing to data from which it will use to base it's decision making off.
Just my 2 cents...