Over at Battelle’s there is a good AI discussion. I’m always amazed by how reluctant we humans are to realize that our intellectual abilities are neat, but generally overrated. In the evolution debate you see folks unwilling to recognize the obvious fact that humans are *almost certainly* an evolutionary extension of simpler organisms. In the AI debate even many who agree that humans are the product of evolution seem reluctant to assume that machines will ever attain consciousness.

Sure, there are significant computational and possibly biological hurdles in the quest for a fully conscious machine intellect, but there’s little reason to think these can’t be overcome within at most a few decades and hopefully sooner.

Hey – maybe I’m just sucking up to the intelligent machines so they’ll like me when they start reading the internet stuff written before they were conscious. Shame on me!