Kurzweil might be crazy, I give you that. But he has a good counter argument against this argument. He has brought up that no matter what computers do (play chess, drive a car, do a surgery...) people then decide that the task doesn't require real intelligence because a computer can do it.
XD...
I actually started a thread on this some time ago. Kurzweil keeps repeating that we will have full-blown A.I by 2029 and that we already have "limited A.I". Bullshit. What we have now, as we had in 1943 when the first computer went in operation, are machines that execute a program. There has been no progress in this area since John Von Neumann published his "The Computer And the Brain" paper back in 1954 when he suggested that the difference between computer intelligence and Human awareness is not merely a difference in programming, but also a difference in architecture. Just because the machine can read Human facial expressions to a limited degree or interpret statments that might be seen as a deceit does not make them self-aware because it is still executing a program. No matter how sophisticated the computer is, it is always executing a program and it can never break free of the orginal programming. A Human learns new things and decides what to do with the information. Humans are self-programming. A computer, even an extremely sophisticated one that utilizes billions of lines of code and can learn new information and utilize it to solve problems that are not clear cut, having flexibility of thought, will only be as flexible within the parameters that it was programmed to be, and it can never ponder outside those parameters. A self-aware computer would need to have no parameters(programming) just like a Human. Humans can decide what to do with the information they learn, that is, Humans are self-programming. The only constraints on Humans are personality traits, which are not really clear-cut paramaters but rather restrains on actions rather than on thinking. A shy person will never decide(Self-program) to climb Mount Everest, because fear will preclude him. But this is not a constraint as severe as the parameters of a computer program, and the person can ponder what it would be like to climb Everest and visit it through other means, such as pictures and videos of people climbing it. A computer would never decide to do something outside the parameters it is programmed within.
SUCKMYMUSCLE