Can A.I. really match human brainpower?

The arguments of leading scientists Professor Aaron Sloman, Dr Amanda Sharkey and Professor Igor Aleksander are summarised below. Do you agree with their views?

Professor Aaron Sloman from the University of Birmingham

"In order to come up with machines that have the same kind of abilities as humans, we have to do a huge amount of analysis of what it is to be a normal human being. So the hard task is to know what the skills are that you have to replicate on machines, and I think we have a huge way to go. The fact that computers are very fast doesn't necessarily help us understand the problem that we are trying to use them to solve."

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Dr Amanda Sharkey from the University of Sheffield:

"If you look at what we have achieved, at what systems we have that seem to be intelligent, we don't have systems really. You could model an aspect of intelligence, but we don't have anything that is a whole intelligent system. And my hunch is that it is in principle impossible to go further. If you create an artificial system it's not integrated with the environment and actually motivated by itself. You've still got an external person who is making it do that".

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Professor Igor Aleksander from Imperial College:

"Artificial Intelligence is in a state of flux at the moment. For the last 50 years or so the main idea was to write programs that do smart things like playing chess, recognising specific bits of speech, some visual scenes, and even attempt to understand language. While this led to some successful technology, the results, when compared with the abilities of human beings, were disappointing. The main problem is that the brain is an evolved and self-learning system which provides its owner with awareness of the world and even a consciousness - a sense of being. The old A.I. is only as smart as the programmer who has written the programs. So to develop the A.I. of the future, people in A.I. laboratories are now looking much more closely at the mechanisms of the brain and the way they learn, evolve and develop intelligence from a sense of being conscious."

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