We may not need to replicate the mind.

We've built planes that fly, yet don't flap like birds, and submarines that swim, yet don't have fins. I suspect whatever ultimately ends up being true general purpose useful AI may not look anything like a human brain, but achieve a similar and useful end result (much like planes and birds fly using very different mechanics, each having pros/cons and each being valuable).

That is like trying to create a bird instead of understanding the principle of flight. By understanding the principle of intelligence we can do better than our current level intelligence. One contender for understanding this principle is AIXI: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=V6u....

Well if we spent 60 years failing to fly we probably would be looking at recreating what a bird does pretty closely.

is there any more viable hypothesis?

the brain is just a configuration of matter. seems like recreating this configuration is inevitable? and isn't it a safe assumption that if it's configured the same way it will behave the same way?

once we can understand the system we can synthesize it in software. AI in the mean time, seems like a guessing game.

Personally, having worked on AI research in the late 80s and early 90s I don't observe a lot of progress in replicating general intelligence. Of course, there has been a huge amount of progress in special purpose systems leveraging the huge amount of computing power we have now - but the fundamentals of general intelligence look as puzzling now as they did 20 years ago. I don't believe that we really have the right algorithms and it's simply a matter of scaling up the underlying hardware.

I think the most likely way to achieve a "real" general intelligence will be by reverse engineering how functioning brains and minds work. At least is an area where continual, albeit rather slow, progress is being made - eventually we will know how the mind works (assuming that there isn't anything fundamentally weird going on - which seems unlikely).

Once we understand how minds actually work I suspect there should be a good chance that we can upgrade/optimize these structures - either by architectural improvements or by throwing more resources at the areas that constrain current performance in biological brains. At that point things really could get rather exciting - but I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime (I'm in my 40s).

thanks! i have no background in AI but this just makes sense to me. this is why blue brain project [0] etc are exciting. so far there is less tangible output than traditional AI research, but it seems to be the only front focusing on true "intelligence".

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project

edit: i admit i didn't read the article before replying here. my thoughts were already better articulated; "They're not studying the mind and they're not trying to find out the principles of intelligence, so research may not be the right word for what drives people in the field that today is called artificial intelligence. They're doing product development."

I had no idea there was an EU "Human Brain Project":

https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/

That looks rather cool!

"but I don't expect this to happen in my lifetime (I'm in my 40s)."

Why not? What fundamental things you think are lacking? I think we'll have ai in 10-20 years.