The Age of Spiritual Machines

What will the turning point be? When will humanity as a race acknowledge that it has created artificial sentient beings? This is a question I am not prepared to answer, but which I ask with great enthusiasm.

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At some point, likely in the near future, software will catch up to hardware. Our most advanced computers today are very powerful, but humanity lacks the ability to create software programs which take full advantage of physical computing capacity.

As awareness of and interest in the field of Artificial Intelligence grows, more and more advanced methods of creating thinking programs are being developed and becoming (relatively) common knowledge.

In order to bring about an Artificial Intelligence revolution, computer scientists don't need to be able to build a god-like super-human intelligence. We need only to create a hardware/software combination slightly more powerful than the human brain, and teach it how to program.

Once we can accomplish this, the gloves are off.

The AI can be unleashed and allowed to design an AI more intelligent than itself, which will also be able to create an even better one, ad infinitum.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

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No one really knows. After we succesfully create the first slightly super-human AI, the process of self-improvement within the world of virtual intelligence will be both beyond our control and beyond our understanding.

The best thing we can do is augment ourselves, communicate with our creation, and hope for a merger of man and machine.

This will be the end of man, and the beginning of the Age of Spiritual Machines.

For more information on Artificial Intelligence, and to become involved in the field yourself, I recommend visiting Udacity and taking their free online computer science courses, which culminate in developing an Artificial Intelligence program for a self driving vehicle.