Strong AI is impossible, flying cars are impractical, and what would we do on Mars?

But look at all the cool stuff we got instead! Augmented reality! Internet everywhere! 3D printing! Controllable prostetic limbs! Gigaherz multicore computers! Terabyte storage! Sliced bread!

Also, almost noone dies of AIDS of anymore, or has died in the last 10 years in our western countries. The HIV suppressants are so good that even if you are infected with HIV, you'll have the same life expectancy as everyone else. It's not cured, but the quality of life is very similar.

Yeah, internet, sliced bread and all that are great. But flying cars and a cure for AIDS would have been nice too.

My point is that in the '80s there was a lot of optimism about humankind's capabilities, people were saying "it's not a question of what CAN we do anymore, it is what SHOULD we do", implying we COULD do anything. I believed that at the time, but have grown increasingly skeptical (and I blame the brain drain away from science and into zero-sum games like finance for not fulfilling our potential).

Also, you are wrong about AIDS - apparently in USA alone there are around 18,000 AIDS caused fatalities each year (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/us.htm).

You are wrong about AI too, it has already been implemented - in meat, of all things!

We can do everything we want, just not in 5 years. It took thousands of years to get from living in caves to having a steam machine, and a fraction of that to where we are now. The next 30 years are going to be awesome - it's a great time to be alive. (I think this several times a day, look at how awesome our lives are (well those of us reading this, obviously not yet everybody on earth))

Well, the more you know, the more you know that you don't know.

Predicting what we'll have in the future is always going to be hard, because it's very hard to know the pitfalls, the actual hard problems of a technology. Sending stuff to Mars isn't hard, but having a human survive the trip is really hard because of radiation and psychology, and it took a while to figure that out.

Meanwhile, noone in the 80's thought we'd have the internet, tablets, or mobile phones.

"The lack of data from the future makes predictions hard"

AI in meat? Care to share more about that?

I guess he meant that "strong AI" is you and me.

"Strong AI is impossible"

What makes you think that? Given that we have one class of systems that have evolved general intelligence I can see no reason why we can't engineer others. This may, of course, be rather difficult but I'm not aware of any good argument that engineering a general intelligence is impossible for fundamental physical or logical reasons.

Well, it's based on a bit of a philosophical cop-out, but basically anything that claims to be strong AI will always only be a philosophical zombie. It might behave intelligent, it might claim to be intelligent and conscious, but it's impossible to prove that it actually is intelligent and conscious, since it's impossible to objectively measure or describe consciousness.

In short, I'm with Searle. We can never have strong AI, but we can certainly have weak AI.

Isn't that just a denial of the terms/definitions? Isn't it also a solipsistic argument, i.e. doesn't it equally apply to all other people?

I agree with everything you said except the bit about quality of life being similar. Don't those drugs have major side effects? Even if they don't, sex with another person is pretty much over at that point. Even if the other person has AIDS too there is a risk of reinfection.

Granted, having a similar life expectancy is nothing to sneeze at.

Actually, if you're on HIV suppressants, the virus levels in your blood is so low that it's almost impossible to infect other people through sex, even if you have unprotected sex.

The risk isn't 0%, but it's less risky to have unprotected sex with someone infected, but on suppressants, than to have unprotected sex with someone who doesn't know if he or she is infected.

I just want to grow some species in Mars. Fly with my car for fun. And talk with my computer about private stuff :-)

"what would we do on Mars?"

All the cool stuff in life resulted from the words "I wonder.." and "let's go see..". I am sure people will figure out the answer to your question.

GFC? I've looked over this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFC, and still don't have a clue which you might mean.

He probably refers to the financial crisis -- there have been theories flying around that our society is rotten to the core because of money.

Taking money out of the equation would be an interesting experiment - what if you'd had access to wealth based on your achievements that benefit human kind and not based on whether you're playing stock market games?

So in other words, we are doomed :)

On the other hand, as a cynical contrarian that I am, I'm thinking that medicine may have gone too far. Natural selection doesn't work anymore.

Yes, I meant the financial crisis. I did not mean that our society is rotten to the core, but it seems to me that an inexcusable proportion of our best brains are drawn in to play zero-sum games (much of finance, also law).

Finance isn't a Zero-Sum game (well, not all of it anyway). Investing money in the right place can create more wealth for all of humanity.

This becomes an especially cringing realization when considering that a LOT of people are celebrating twitter, facebook and "apps" as the glorious, big and important inventions (almost paradigm shifts) of our time...