Some of the best AI work is now coming from Dr Markram at the Brain Mind institute. Read his bio for a glimpse into the “mind” of the machine. This institute may be the first place where a computer will become conscious and self aware, though it’s also possible this will come from a Google, MSN, or Yahoo server farm thanks to the massive parallel processing. However, those places are not focused on AI where BMI is seeking to reverse engineer the human brain, and has made a lot of progress in this direction.
Joe Duck
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Joe Duck 
That’s Great,
it means Robocops soon will be a reality
and why not – afterall – computer is a man made device and if its start working like a human brain :: what else we want – this means – no errors atall
Great interesting post – keep it up
Thanks Mitesh. Robotic soldiers – at least the mechanism parts – is one of the areas where there is a lot of innovation but also a lot of potential peril. For example think what would happen if a Hitler-like leader was the first to develop a very advanced thinking soldier robot. We can hope (and I actually believe) that thinking robots will develop their own moral sense based on pure reason, but even if they initially are programmed for “evil” than we all could be … screwed.
Many people still have their head in the sand about this, thinking that “we’ll just unplug the machines if they get out of hand”. As a thinking entity myself I am inclined to go to great lengths to keep people from “unplugging me”, and even though I’m optimistic that the thinking machines will be benevolent we’ll want to have some plans for what to do if they are … not!