Are conscious robots possible?

[stevencarrwork]

Can God make a conscious robot?

What is it about the physical properties of silicon that prevent an omnipotent God from giving a robot consciousness, and what are the physical properties of fatty acids and sugars that mean that God can make conscious brains?

[Ian Parker]

Developers will probably use neural networks with evolution. That is, by starting with a pretty much random arrangement of artificial neurons and having mutations occur often, mutations such as how they are arranged and how they act. Combine this with using some form of selection to choose which AI "brains" get to be copied or mutated into the next generation, and you will get a neural network well suited to the selection parameters.

If they want an intelligent conscious neural network they would probably set the selection parameters to test for intelligence, consciousness, and thought.

There is one point which I think you have missed. AI would be developed on the web, not in the form of a robot. The web is where all the information is.

In a genetic algorithm you have genes which can be fit or unfit, genetic algorithms are completely different from neural networks. You might use genes to select parameters for your neural network. I hink your discussion of evolution is hiding one important fact and that is that for AI to be intelligent, it needs to be non Goedel, that ios to say it needs an inference engine or whatever that is capable of autonomous chance. CYC is the only current system that is even attempting to do this.

For more information of AI look at Intelligent Design in this foerum where I have argued that Intelligence by its nature is too complex to evolve. There is a very detailed discussion of AI and some quite interesting conclusions are reached. The point about Goedels theorem is quite an interesting point.

As far as computer vpower is concerned, if we have the web at our disposal, and search engines like Google would be ionterested in anything that will understand concepts, so all the web is not so impossible. If you have the right algorithmic approach.