Asteroid retrieval by rotary rocket, by Jerome Pearson

On 2/9/06, Combs, Mike wrote:
(...)
> The reality of the 21st Century is that Honda is justifiably proud of a
> robot that can actually walk without falling over.

And Sony decided to stop producing Aibo, which by the way is a
sophisticated toy, as have been all those "media darling" robots
produced by the Japanese in the last 25 years or so.

> The problems have turned out to me much more difficult than the early
> proponents had anticipated. Predictions being made right now about AI
> in the next several decades might be more accurate, but they might be
> more of the same.
(...)

Although I myself deal with aspects of AI/Machine Learning in my work
(or perhaps *because* I deal with them ;-), I think it will be "more
of the same". The "Moore Law" argument that I saw here is
inapplicable: even if we build a computer a billion times more
powerful than the human brain, that computer will be just a over-sized
number cruncher with no consciousness at all. Consciousness would only
be achieved with adequate programming, which plainly we have no idea
at all about how to do. And, of course, that is assuming that we
ourselves are Turing Machines - i.e., mathematically speaking we are
equivalent to computers - but that hypothesis may well be wrong as
many other past analogies for the human mind: clock, steam engine,
etc.