Spain: I, Thinking Machine [1]

Once again, the online magazine Edge has returned to stimulate an exciting intellectual debate of great height, with the annual question that launches on these dates to some of the brightest minds of our time. On this occasion, its brilliant editor John Brockman has raised the challenge of dissecting the lights and shadows of the artificial intelligence (AI): "Do you think about the machines that think?" The responses reflect a wide range of views among some of the great scientists and thinkers of the world today, showing that there is no consensus clear when assessing to what point should celebrate or fear the emergence of thinking machines.

At one end are the great American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, who mocks with much scorn of the "urban legend" according to which "the robots we will dominate" in the near future. On the other are scientists of the stature of the astrophysicist's NASA and Nobel prize winner John C. Mather, who is convinced that the artificial intelligence "will become a reality, and quite soon", taking into account the massive amount of money that is already being invested in this field, and the enormous potential benefits awaiting entrepreneurs who built the first computers with human (or superhuman) intelligence.

However, although experts are not based on the time of predict whether much or little time for the era of AI, there is a very broad consensus on the unstoppable advent, sooner or later, this revolution. The reason explains it very well the physicist and Nobel Prize Frank Wilczek, citing the famous "astonishing hypothesis" of the co-discoverer of DNA, Francis Crick: the human mind is nothing more than "an emergent property of matter" and therefore "all intelligence is intelligence produced by a machine" (either a brain formed by neurons or a robot manufactured with silicon chips). 

As I said in a memorable interview the great Spanish neuroscientist Rafael Yuste: "inside the skull there is no magic, the human mind and all our thoughts, our memories and our personality, everything is based on shots of groups of neurons. There is nothing more, there is a spirit in the ether... There is a great lack of knowledge on how to operate this machine. But I am sure that consciousness arises from the physical substrate which we have on the brain."

And so, as the biologist George Church says in his own answer to the question of Edge, "I am a thinking machine, made of atoms." If this is true, the appearance of another type of machine that can also think is only a matter of time.

Spanish Language Original [5]