Hawking embraces the Borg

Manach

http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_387951.html?menu=news.latestheadlines.worldnews

Bob the Unlucky Octopus

Ah, Hawking's pet theory is back...he's always clamored that AI should be given equal footing as human intelligence- he's previously argued that computer viruses are alive, etc, etc.

As I understand it AI still has some severe limitations to overcome before it even gets close to the organization and complexity of the human brain. Computer folks, feel free to elaborate

Also, the fact that intelligent systems will be modeled on human intelligence makes it extremely unlikely that emotional cognition will arrive any time soon. Even child-like behavior is very difficult to simulate afaik

Occy

Greenbean

There are those who simply want to emulate human intelligence and there are those who wish to create self sustaining intelligence. To emulate a childs brain would actually be most the battle in creating a human brain - childrens brains aren't simply stupid versions of adults brains, they are specialised systems for learning how to learn - like malleable plastic goops of putty. Alot of research goes into figuring out whats so important about the 12 year incubation period before the brain develops fully, and they think its got alot to do with slow learning techniques which people like eldeman harpon about (slow learning creates a situation were a system can learn by taking things in small chunks and only be given positive examples - no negative examples from which to figure out which are good and bad - and still be able to learn). Unfortunately I think most of cognitive science is based around everyone trying to prove and tell Chomskey what a fricken idiot he is and prove his theories wrong, but I suppose conflict is a good way to drive forward progress.

Hecate

This is nothing new!

http://www.theonion.com/onion3123/hawkingexo.html