Will there be a true artificial mind one day?
Are we near the limit of AI?
We all love that dream of having a robot with the perfect replica of the human brain and mind. We spend thousands of billions of dollars for R&D on artificial intelligence-related principles thinking that one day we would be able to build an artificial human. But would that day ever come? I mean not today for sure, but even by 3041?
To answer this question first we need to understand what is ‘intelligence’, or more likely what is consciousness. Humans and all the other animals bear with different levels of ability to interpret an internal or external signal and take an action through a decision-making process on their own; thus making them intelligent. Though humans are leaps and bounds ahead of all the other animals in this matter, still animals also have this capability to some level and can be trained & improved. But let’s just focus on the human mind for now.
The mechanism of our mind is truly magnificent and has never been able to explore completely through a piece of scientific equipment and map it into a theory. It works at a rate of thousands of billions of times per second (which we can’t grasp the complexity and speed) and producing a continuous and never-ending flow of thoughts. Through this process, a human is always interpreting something that may be related to the past, present, or future at any given moment, even in our sleep. This alone makes it impossible to develop a human-like mind artificially.
There are a couple of rock-solid blockades for achieving perfect AI.
complex nature of the human mind
Needless to say, the human mind works in a very strange way. We always looking for something, trying to achieve it regardless of the meaning and the rationality of our goal. We change our perception of everything we know and make new ones and keep doing that until we eventually die. This happens every second and we are used to thinking that whatever is on our mind at this moment will stay that way for the rest of our lives, oh but it won’t. This mechanism is nearly impossible to develop artificially but it is one of the most prominent things that separate humans from machines.
Decision making
An artificial mind can be programmed to take inputs, analyze and deliver the output. But it won’t be like a human mind since it’ll always be only a direct input and output process. By nature humans never think rationally (even though we encourage ourselves to do so, hmm what a joke). There are millions of thoughts appearing (both relevant and non-relevant) when we are trying to make a decision. These thoughts can be related to anything we’ve seen, heard, or felt in our lifetime. This massive flow of thoughts undoubtedly alters our decisions and perspectives, second by second. Also, it’s really hard and kind of pointless to implement this in an Artificial Neural Network.
True emotions
Doesn’t matter how brilliant a machine would it’d never feel like humans do. It’ll have the capability to express emotions analyzing data based on the provided inputs but again it’ll be just a program.
One day there will be machines that can perform almost every task a human would perform in life except for human-like thinking. There will always be a pre-defined set of commands that navigate these machines to do what we want. Even though we could be creating an artificial model of the human brain, get ourselves deceived by a smart voice assistant, we will never be able to create another human from metal who thinks and acts just like you and me.
