Machines Like Us

The world's programmers have succeeded in automating the delivery of electricity to our homes, the trading of stocks on exchanges, and much of the flow of goods and services to stores and offices across the globe, but, after more than half a century of research, they have yet to reach the holy grail of computer science -- an artificial general intelligence (AGI).

The raw computing power may finally exist -- and be cheap enough -- to run an AGI program. But many of the core semantic and philosophical problems that science faced several decades ago are as palpable as ever today. How exactly do you write a computer program that can think like a human?

At the 2007 Singularity Summit in San Francisco, The Futurist magazine spoke with MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, Adaptive A.I. Inc. founder Peter Voss, Self-Aware Systems founder Steve Omohundro, Powerset CEO Barney Pell, and Google research director Peter Norvig. They asked them how they envisioned AI developing in the years ahead, when an AGI might emerge, and how worried should we be about that whole killer-robot-goes-on-rampage scenario.

Read full story in The Futurist.