Personal Reflection for 25/04/2014: Artificial Intelligence

For my personal reflection this week, I'd like to talk about some recent things that we've discussed in my philosophy class about intelligence. So first of all, it's pretty hard to define intelligence. Some people think that intelligence is defined by self-awareness, some by the ability to mimic other intelligent life in such a way that it is impossible to differentiate between the real and the artificial, and yet some more think that it is defined by the ability to compute or access vast stores of information. Many scientists are trying to develop artificial intelligences. Some people think that these AI's will never be able to act "human" and others think that giving these machines intelligence will eventually lead to a robot uprising. Many of the earlier attempts to create these artificial intelligences simply meant packing a computer with as much processing power as it could hold. A more creative and probably more feasible approach is to wire processors in computers like those in the human brain. In theory, if you could copy every neuron in a brain, turn it into a bit (1's or 0's), and wire it like the neurons in the brain were wired, it should function the same way that they human brain does. This leaves us with the question: Is artificial intelligence a possibility for the future?