The achievement is impressive, but it is a wholly formal achievement that involves no knowledge…and it does not come within a million miles of replicating the achievements of everyday human thought.
—Law professor Stanley Fish, on Watson, the I.B.M.–built computer that won a game of “Jeopardy” (The New York Times Opinionator blog, Feb. 21, 2011)
By 2029, we’ll have reverse engineered and modeled and simulated all the regions of the brain. And that will provide us the software/algorithmic methods to….create machines that really do have the subtlety and suppleness of human intelligence.
—Futurist Ray Kurzweil, explaining what he calls the “coming singularity” (BigThink.com video, #14532)
There is something uncanny and creepy about the way the brain intrudes on the mind, as if the mind has been infiltrated by an alien life form. —Philosopher Colin McGinn, in a review of V.S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes ...
