Gigaom AI Minute – December 26

Transcript

Is consciousness required to build an artificial general intelligence? It may well be. That is the unique thing that gives human intelligence the plasticity that we all are familiar with that is so hard to duplicate in machines. If this is the case, it poses a real challenge. We don't really know how to express the question of, “Why is it that we are conscious?” It's the last great scientific question that we neither know how to pose, nor how to answer. It's the difference between the computer being able to sense something, like the temperature, and the computer being able to feel something, like pain, and whatever that difference is may be an integral part of our intelligence and incredibly difficult to produce in non-organic matter.