To Be or Not to Be

A couple of years ago, futurist Ray Kurzweil said robots would become sentient by 2029. He originally made this prediction in his 1999 novel, “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” with the addenda that these claims would be largely accepted. In his overall timeline, Kurzweil states that by 2099, there will no longer be any clear distinction between humans and computers and that most conscious entities won’t have a permanent residence (bodies).

These predictions go against recent research by scientists at the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison and others. These scientists state that truly sentient machines may never exist by their mathematical definition for a framework of consciousness being so complex that computers cannot handle any process that completely integrates all of the world’s information without losing memory. There  are objections to this treatise, including Univ. of Sussex neuroscientist Anil Seth who notes that “not many neuroscientists would claim that consciousness requires lossless memory.”

Fonte: Laboratory Equipment