We will eventually see the rise of artificial intelligence, and even artificial consciousness.

I'm sorry, but I feel that "we" as a general rule includes me. Although I'd be free to note that we might very well wipe ourselves out tomorrow and certainly fail to succeed in any such projects. In fact, with world affairs as they are today it might be exceedingly optimistic to suggest we'll last the 40 years I proposed. I'm fairly certain that despite your claims to the contrary, you cannot suddenly change terms in mid swing. The same claim has been made for decades that "we will see the rise of AI" and it has consistently meant "we" as in "us" will see this event within our lifetime. However, the fact that you don't expect AI in this lifetime is certainly not much of a ringing endorsement for your position. Usually when "we" gets vaguely applied to mankind in some sort of general vague fashion it is because the proponent of the statement realizes how unfeasible the claim is within recent history. - The basis of your argument is, "The future is up in the air, you can't prove it impossible, therefore it will happen." Sorry, no. The fact that we have done nothing in the field outside of fail splendidly is at the least important. You think we need to go back and rework some stuff and figure out exactly what we are dealing with in order to code it. We need to figure out what intelligence is and figure out what consciousness is and then program them. We are starting the process quite literally at step 0. We don't even understand the terms. You've offered nothing to suggest that we are pushing toward this goal or doing anything more than the last 40 years of treading water on the subject. You are attempting to do three distinctly unacceptable things here: 1) You are trying to predict the future to unreal extents. Beyond wanting to predict what will happen 40+ years from now, you want to render predictions beyond our lifespans and what science will be able to do at such points in time. I have failed to see *ANY* prediction worth spit even five years out. The entire realm of predicting future events seems to be a complete joke. 2) You are attempting to parlay the ambiguity of the future into a positive claim. See, the future is so totally up in the air, you can no more conclude AI thusly than you can a race of future supermen is clearly a possibility and thus will arise. 3) You are shifting the burden of proof. "Prove that it is impossible that we will see a race of supermen arise!" -- I'm sorry but no. You are attempting to state an affirmative claim that we will see the rise of AI on the grounds that we don't know what is going to happen in the future. - You do, at the very least, go to the trouble of showing that since the brain can do it shouldn't the computer be able to do it? My answer to this is "no." First let me say that there is a stunningly large gap between "not impossible" and "will eventually". However, computers are at the very least great calculators with useful states and functions to produce rather amazing results. However, there is generally a rule that things which computers can do easily humans can do very poorly and things humans can do well computers can do poorly. For example anybody submitting a comment on this debate will submit it with a captcha, a bit of image text easily converted into letters by humans. However, coding a computer to do even this very minor task is nearly impossible. This is but one is a massive list of things which computers simply can't do and humans easily can. You ask that computers be able to do all of this. Beyond excessively powerful OCR capabilities it will need to perfectly understand human speech from the get go, understand what words mean, understand abstract concepts and do all thing things humans brains are great at and computers simply cannot do. And how do we know this will happen? According to your argument we know this will happen specifically because we *don't* know what will happen. That sound you just heard, was me being underwhelmed. - This is a bit more than the simple arguments of elderly scientists suggesting that ideas are wrong, it is simply because these scientists have dedicated the better parts of their lives to this challenge and failed to get beyond step 0 that they are saying it isn't feasible. If we take a good long look at the successes in AI what we see is some interesting programming languages and some neat algorithms which are auxiliary to the field. Beyond that, we see that there is nothing. Not one even partially successful implementation of anything close to the goal of AI. In fact, we don't even know what is meant by intelligence in order to have a first step towards programming it into a computer. You say you were expecting something more than noting that it isn't possible to program AI and that it's a impossible pipedream? What exactly did you expect? I am to fawn over the possibility that the entire field does something worthwhile and suddenly gets beyond step 0 to an understanding of what intelligence is and assume to know what intelligence and that it can be programmed? You say that "we will eventually see the rise of AI" -- on what grounds? Feasibility? We might as well argue that we'll have really good computers able to predict the future to a near certainty where not disallowed by quantum physics. Rightly they should be able to trivially predict human behavior and calculate what we will do. This might just be feasible, but it still won't happen in our life times and we will never see it. We've tried AI. It has been a huge and massive failure. And I think it is incumbent on you to provide some reason why the future will be any brighter for the field. The idea that we need a step back and to relook at the situation isn't new either. Take look at some of John McCarthy's (Coined AI) comments on the topic back 9 years ago: http://news-service.stanford.edu... "Despite the progress that has been made in AI since he coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the 1950s, the research has not brought the field within development range of simulating human intelligence, which is its ultimate goal, he said. "We still need new basic ideas. So it may take five years, and it may take 500 years. The understanding of intelligence is a hard scientific problem." This idea that we should go back to basics and figure out this idea of intelligence is obvious, it has been obvious for the last four decades when everybody who realized how unsuccessful AI was continued to fail. What we have is a complete and utter pile of crap. We haven't done anything towards the goal of creating AI and our few rare successes have been in technological regions nearby. Firstly, I think you wrongly discount any interplay with the soul. There's a difference between just outright disregarding the idea and having shown it's false. If we have souls than AI isn't possible. I thusly think it's at least a requirement by your side to disprove the soul rather than discount it on no grounds. I hold that the complete failure of AI is, in part, due to the impossibility to code that little extra part that makes us human in the transcendental sense. - You compare my claims to impossible flying machine claims. This is wrong. There were plenty of flying machines prior to 1903 but nobody could steer. If we had some okay ideas about AI and kind of off programs... sure. But we have NOTHING! Not even programs that make you go... "that was neat." - From what we do understand of intelligence. A lot of it seems to be borrowed from culture and others. You couldn't have an intelligent machine on the grounds that machines aren't part of culture. They lack the human spark and, on top of that, let us not overlook the unmitigated disaster of AI. Your argument is a pipedream built on a pipedream. It is a reversed argument from ignorance: We don't know what the future holds, so it holds AI.