Re: Very Impressive
Won't the interesting point be when we achieve, in software, equal intelligence and flexibility to the human mind, but realise that it's still just "clever programming"?
The problem with that scenario is that the first clause describes something that is not well-defined, and the second describes something that is endlessly debatable.
There's no useful metric for "intelligence" or for intellectual "flexibility", so you can't meaningfully compare those attributes for two entities, except in a very subjective and vague fashion.
And there's no consensus on whether or when certain types of machine-learning systems become something qualitatively different than their initial state. Many people claim there are "emergent features" in long runs of certain unsupervised-learning and artificial-life algorithms, and that it's not proper to ascribe those features to the programming, since the developer had no idea what they would be. It's a contentious position, but a valid one.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
