Around 20 years ago I had the thought of this: What kind of computing power would you need to have a virtual person, an ‘AI’ that doesn’t know it’s an AI, and it be inside a virtual world, and have real people in VR suits, as ‘avatars’ interact with that AI, and would the AI question it’s reality.
My thinking was that inside this environment, this AI thinks it has arms and legs and whatever is normal.. Or we would tell it that whatever environment we ‘gave’ it was normal.
The other way to accomplish this would be to emulate down to the portion level.. a human being. Imagine how complex this would be !
For me it simply seemed like a thing that some group will try in the future.
I posed this question to a couple of people, and back then I got this responses:
- Why ?
- Stupid
- Impossible
- Never going to happen
One response was so negative we got into an argument about it, “why even think things like that when it’s impossible”
It’s now 2018… I don’t think we are now outside the realms of ‘impossible’ for much longer.
Will ‘general’ AI be happening any time soon… waaaaaatch out – It’s already coming.