Critical Thinking Blog Post #2

Artifical Intelligence (AI) has advanced and is continuing to advance throughout the years. Robots have improved immensely from the creation of the first robot. They have been created to walk and talk better, and they also now are being developed to have human features such as human faces and being able to show emotions. They are doing things that we never imagined they would do. In LIB110 we saw a video of a robot now being able to show emotions through facial expressions. It can show any type of emotion from happy to angry to confused and so on. There is talk that soon robots might even be able to have consiousness like humans. However there are many arguments for and against this. In David Gelernter's essay Dream-Logic, The Internet and Artifical Thought he addresses his point of view about what is being  said about conciousness in robotics. He states "Here is an unfortunate truth: today's mainstream ideas about humans and artifical intelligence thought lead nowhere" (Gelernter 202). Here Gelernter states how he feels about AI, he says that he thinks that thought in robots is not going to happen. Gelernter also states that a machine will not be able to think without free-association which humans so in fact have. Free-association is when one can let their mind wander, in a way like day dreaming. He states they machines will not be able to do that therefore they cannot be build to have a conciouness (Gelernter 202). On the other hand in Ray Kurzweil's essay "The Singularity is Near" he has a somewhat different view on artifical intelligence then Gelernter. He argues that "Artifical Intelligence at human levels will necessarily greatly exceed human intelligence for several reasons" ( Kurzweil 138). Kurzweil definately thinks that AI will be smarter and a huge advantage to the world then humans are and will be. He states many reasons to this, one which is that humans are able to only develop their skills in ways that have been encouraged by evolution whereas AI can advance further then the ways humans can (Kurzweil 138).
There are many opinions and arguments to AI advancement and whether AI can be created with conciouness which humans already possess or not. My opinion on this is that AI cannot have conciousness like we do, and they will never be created with it. There might be some creations that might come close to devleoping conciousness in AI but robots will never be able to think exactly like humans do. This is because robots will never be able to posses a mind like we do and in that case they will never be able to have conciousness.