Leisesturm

I doubt the technology is almost ready. It can't possibly be. But... how good does it have to be to be better than 85% of human beings? That's probably where they are aiming. Computers have LONG been past the point at which they could demolish 85% of human chess players. The remaining 14% was a lot tougher but the last 1%...? Well, I think they are finally there but it takes millions of dollars of supercomputer to do it. That is the difference between artificial intelligence and human consciousness. It is still a CHASM of ability. The hardware that runs our intelligence is pitiful in machine terms. Computer hardware operates in Gigahertz, completing billions of operations in far less than a second. And they need to, because they must still handle data one bit at a time! Human consciousness manipulates data in a way that we still don't understand, and that's probably a good thing because if we could ever replicate human consciousness and superpose that on the quad core multi-gigahertz processors available the results would not be controllable. Humanity would be writing its epitaph. I'm hardly imagining the horrors of human enslavement to machine authoritarians, I'm imagining something much worse: the complete irrelevance of humanity, and a very strong argument for its complete and utter annihilation. Machine intelligence can guide a car safely through a snowstorm, but human consciousness can process a five day forecast and decide not to take in a three day skiing weekend.