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Re:The Myth of a Superhuman AI by nolemurs on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:01AM (#14211106)
> I'm of the opinion that that's an assumption being made.

Not so much an assumption as a reasonable guess. Is it logically possible that there's something magical about human brains? Yes.

But there are countless examples of things we thought were magical historically, and, as far as I know, exactly zero that we've ended up concluding actually were magical, and a large number that we're pretty confident aren't at this point.

The smart money here is on "no, the human brain isn't magical."

Re:The Myth of a Superhuman AI by ben_w on Thursday April 27, 2017 @02:14PM (#14213605)
I think there may be a problem with the word "magical" in this context, just like there is a problem with nature-worshipers talking of "supernatural powers".

If we've made a science out of it, no matter how advanced it is, it's not magic — e.g. if telekinesis was possible, it would have a scientific explanation and be a natural power — which bares some similarly to the way things are called "artificial intelligence" when they're impossible, only to be reduced to "trivial" when someone makes a machine do them: Chess, Go, having a large vocabulary or knowing many languages, being good at arithmetic or being able to do calculus at all, writing music or news stories, trading on the stock market — all things that used to be synonymous with genius, yet all done by machines we don't call intelligent.