Comment about “The search for a thinking machine”

The article The search for a thinking machine, by BBC News, is about AI (Artificial Intelligence). We can separate AI in 2 big categories: weak ones and strong ones.

The weak ones are the ones that currently work and that are more and more used by computer users and modern human societies. They are based on mathematics and a lot of computations, but that are not problems for computers like it is for men and women. Thanks to the continuous rise of their computing power and their easy “ways” to implement weak AI, they are more and more effective in practice. That is not the case of strong AI that try to replicate the cleverness of human beings, because we do not even fully know how our brains work and it is far from mathematics, so it is hard to implement strong AI and their uses require a lot of computing power.

However, there is a prediction that one day a computer will overpass common individuals, thanks to improvements of both hardware and software. This hypothetical event is called singularity and will probably happen between 2030 and 2050. This is not a new thing, there is the famous AI Skynet that becomes self-aware and rebels against humanity in 2029 in the film The Terminator released in 1984 ! Most people in our current societies already suffer from problems related to IT - directly or not - and are only a bit aware of them. So humanity has still a lot to learn about political subjects related to computers, hopefully we will understand them enough and act in consequences before the moment it may be too late.