Word: someday
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Consider, says Chalmers, the robot named Cog, being developed at M.I.T.'s artificial-intelligence lab with input from Dennett (see following story). Cog will someday have "skin"--a synthetic membrane sensitive to contact. Upon touching an object, the skin will send a data packet to the "brain." The brain may then instruct the robot to recoil from the object, depending on whether the object could damage the robot. When human beings recoil from things, they too are under the influence of data packets. If you touch something that's dangerously hot, the appropriate electrical impulses go from hand to brain...
...account for all the behavior by talking about physical processes, without ever mentioning feelings. And so too with humans. This, says Chalmers, is the mystery of the "extraness" of consciousness. And it is crystallized, not resolved, by advances in artificial intelligence. Because however human machines become--however deftly they someday pass the Turing test, however precisely their data flow mirrors the brain's data flow--everything they do will be explicable in strictly physical terms. And that will suggest with ever greater force that human consciousness is itself somehow "extra...
...this view, Cog may indeed have consciousness. So might a pandemonium machine. So might a thermostat. Chalmers thinks it quite possible that AI research may someday generate--may now be generating--new spheres of consciousness unsensed by the rest of us. Strange as it may seem, the prospect that we are creating a new species of sentient life is now being taken seriously in philosophy...
...learn about the world the way babies do, programming and reprogramming itself through interactions with the people and objects around it. And Brooks, a professor at M.I.T., is as ambitious for his progeny as any father is for his child. He'd like to have a conversation with Cog someday about nothing in particular...
Abby wants to be a dentist. Britty dreams of piloting planes. "It's gonna be kind of hard in the cockpit when one's flying and the other one's working on someone's teeth," jokes Mike. They are already asking if they might someday find husbands. And why not? says Mike. Other conjoined twins have married. "They're good-looking girls. They're witty. They've got everything going for them, except," he pauses, "they're together...