]]>Our intelligence grows from childhood over many years of training, through our physical and mental interactions with the world. We learn methods alongside experiences. Concepts are built up through ostensive communication, which is impossible without extensive sensory apparatus. For an intelligence to emerge, in an artificial system, we would have to very purposely build it and train it interactively.
I believe that all of those human qualities that we pretend are weaknesses (and superfluous in robots) like emotion, dreaming, and imagination, are precisely the keys to understanding what we mean by intelligence. The brain is far too non-linear to be a Turing machine, and these contextual states are what makes flat information into actionable intelligence. We seem to be trying to compete with a waterfall by binding together hosepipes.
It seems to me that enhanced intelligence is more likely to come from brain science, than from current ideas of artificial logical reasoning. To imagine that silicon technology is the way to advance intelligence seems like the hubris of computer scientists.
If everyone sat down, popped some goggles on and saw what it was like for someone of a different gender or sexuality to have sex, our shared empathy would go through the roof. At the next G8 summit, Cameron and Obama and Putin should all experience first-hand how gruesome it is to be humped by a horny bloke.
He's mostly joking, but I still think he's too optimistic. Look at how the internet puts all the knowledge of history at our fingertips, and people use it mostly to confirm what they want to believe, not to challenge themselves. If we have a choice, we'll tend to use virtual reality the same way.
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