"Jim Fisher" wrote in message
. ..
[...]
" Pearson (some brainiac computer expert guy) predicted that it would be
possible to build a fully conscious computer with superhuman levels of
intelligence as early as 2020.

People have been saying AI is 10 or 20 years away since the late 70's (at
least).

Furthermore, we can create an airplane today that acts exactly like an
airplane that was actually afraid of crashing. In the case of machine
intelligence, emotions may be one way of encoding goals and motivations, but
I hardly think it's clearly the best way.

[...]
Pearson said that computer consciousness would make feasible a whole new
sphere of emotional machines, such as airplanes that are afraid of
crashing."

I'm not sure if this is scary as hell or not.

Possibly for machines with extremely complex design goals (consider a fully
autonomous replacement for human soldiers, for example), using emotions
might be an effective way to allow various competing interests to be
efficiently processed. But when you're just trying to get the machine from
point A to point B without running into anything, I doubt adding emotions
would improve things.

I think talk like that isn't so much scary as it is just plain dumb.

Pete