Probably the reason no one talks about it is no one hasmheard of it. I sure as shit haven’t and I’m all in on AI and HPC stuff.
I’m not sure which comes first, the soft ware or the hard boil. 
I think it wet wear, so to speak will be on the cards when we can do it. There are many projects growing small amounts of brain matter to do work. We just dont have the medical science.
When you think about a human brains processing power and how much watts it needs to run. A whole human is about the power of 100w light bulb.
I can see hardware and wet wear being a thing. Just like nanobots will be replaced by organic bots in time.
We just know so little about organics and a lot about electronics.
Im not sure the internet will become a synthetic AI. You would have to make it that way and it would be a waste of power.
Think about us building a molecular assembly machine while a human takes 1 cell and growth. We just can’t design a cell to make a functioning machine (no brain at all) instead of a mouse.
I suspect the obvious course will be organics at some point. Graphene is certainly organic. I know that jet simulators are operated via rat brains for extended periods of time so neural networking via gold terminals isn’t out of the realm of reality as it has already been done. As for the internet some might argue that organic bots are already hooked into this considering Homo sapiens developed and uses the internet. I’m not pursuaded to think wet ware will be the deal in the future but I won’t rule it out. Wet ware strikes me as being too volatile and vulnerable but who knows? That’s the reason I opened this subject for discussion.
AI:
A couple things to think about:
- We had no idea about aerodynamics when we first constructed planes. Even now there is a lot of unsolved problems in fluid dynamics. Yet thousands of people hop the pond every day just fine.
- To this day we don’t understand how life works exactly, but replace horses with steam engines (and eventually other ones) we did anyway
- Neural networks have proven very effective at many tasks. They are strongly inspired by brains, despite us not understanding brains. Indeed we have recently started to make them less brain-like because they work better this way.
Saying we won’t develop AI because we don’t know how brains work is naïve IMO. It is based on the assumption that we need in depth knowledge when all we really need is inspiration, smart engineers and some time. As far as I’m concerned AI is inevitable, for better or for worse.
Free Will
While there is no definitive proof (yet) but we have several clues that free will does not exist.
- As was discussed before decisions are often made before the subject is aware of them
- We have successfully modelled small brains and predicted their behaviour. This suggests that brains are deterministic. (This was even on the L1 news.)
- So far we simply haven’t seen anything that points to free will being possible. All matter in physics either follows deterministic rules or is truly random. Neither of these allow for any conscious input from the individual.
The last bullet is actually very interesting. Free will could be an emergent property from combining both determinism and randomness. But if this is true then it proves that AI is possible, because computers can already follow deterministic rules so combined with a quantum true random number USB Stick 3000™ they could exhibit intelligence.
TLDR so far it looks like AI is possible and free will is an illusion. We don’t know for sure though so the jury is still out.
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Graphene is not organic in the biological sense and chemists don’t agree on whether it fits the chemical definition either.
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Anything comprised of carbon is chemically organic. I wonder if we even know what ‘free will’ is as I’ve seen a good deal of semantics surrounding this subject. In my opinion AI has already been acheived but then again that depends on what one’s interpretation of AI might be. Synthetic Intelligence is another matter if it is to include actual, cognitive awareness. Anyway that is my view. I don’t think that goal has been acheived yet – at least not in mainstream science but again, who knows?
There is competing definitions for what it means to be organic. Containing carbon is only the simplest one. As I’ve said, chemists don’t agree. Some find it more important how the substance reacts to organic solvents for example.
How is being chemically organic important anyway? Steel contains carbon too…
Spot on. Intelligence, consciousness, being alive and “organic” are all ill defined terms. We have to find a common language before the topics can be discussed in a meaningful way.
EDIT: Oh, look what I just found:
“Allotropes of carbon, such as diamond and graphite, are also excluded because they are simple substances composed of only a single element and therefore are not chemical compounds at all.”
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Good point. Chemists, physicists, biologists, don’t agree. Somewhere on this thread I made a reference to the language of numbers being exponentially more accurate than words. We’re banging our heads against the Babylon syndrome here. as an afterthought When I went to school calcium carbonate was considered an ‘organic compound’.
Here’s another one that could raise an eyebrow. Perhaps not totally unrelated. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KscnT6FxMIQ
That language (ignoring “organic”) is philosophy. Not new age gobbledegook or technobabble. There are literally centuries of writings on the various related subjects.
Yet somehow, in spite of it all, advancements are made and technology marches on. 
No, not in spite of it all. Science is just a branch of philosophy with really cool toys.
Oh, I wouldn’t reduce science to a philosophy but you’re entitled to do that if you wish. I will have to respectfully disagree and I reject your attempt to correct me 
I notice a lack of arguments supporting that opinion.
I think you need to say at this point we have no fucking idea. 100 years ago (People live that long) . We knew nothing. 50 years ago we knew nothing. etc etc.
AI is so stupid because when we dont know organics, which makes it look easy. How does a cockroach survive in skyrim. We cant Even wire a coach roach into skyrim yet.
Googles tensor power on AI is amazing but still stupid. We are tossing billions of peoples diets eating cheese burger at making what one person could solve. I mean MW’s of power
We were talking about the chemical definition of an organic compound. This is just an unfortunate name from chemistry that has nothing to do with being alive, conscious, etc.
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Well, we are certainly entitled to our opinions. I would opine that advancements in science continue is more of an observation but as for science it is defined as “a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged and showing the operation of general laws”. More radically, science is knowledge. Philosophy (lit. love of wisdom) on the other hand, is defined as the investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct, whether natural, normal, or metaphysical (whatever that might be) so this strikes me as another form of investigation equally subject to opinion as well, or at least as well as science is. Of course that is my opinion and I care not how many arguments supporting my opinion may or may not exist. I see examples of it in day-to-day living nearly every day.
ABSOLUTELY! Oh when will the confusion end? lol I suppose we need to define what cognition, awareness, and consciousness are then if we are to proceed. So much ambiguity surrounds AI.
So you want to toss the thread off into graphite is not organic ?
https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=graphene+in+living&btnG=
It supports lots of work on if or not it is. Again we still know nothing…The computer has ripped us forward in one area but we cant cure cancer yet still even with 28 core intel CPU’s @5GGHz.