OSNews

That is an important note. Even the smartest looking AI program only works because a group of smart humans have programmed it, and usually such programs need constant human operation too.

Deep Blue program plays good chess because chess is a very restricted field with restricted rules, and it makes it easy for humans to to program good playing algorithms learned from real human chess masters, and the rest is just brute force calculation. But Deep Blue or any other AI machine only does what it is programmed and told to do. It can only deal with the information that it is programmed to deal with. It cannot adapt into completely new cases and surroundings not programmed into it beforehand.

Just because a discussion simulator like Eliza may fool someone into believing that he is talking to a real person has nothing to do with real intelligence or understanding human emotions. It is basically just a a toy simulator, nothing more, that tries to guess a good answer from its database of ready-made answers to a sentence written by a human. Even with best such similators it is usually easy to find the limits of such programs and make them give silly answers because the humanly programmed database and algorithms can cope only with a restricted amount of pre-programmed cases.

Real human thinking is very different, flexible and adaptive, capable of learning new things all the time, and to adapt into completely new ("non-programmed") situations.

Human thinking is related to consciousness, and you know what, even the top researches in the field still haven't completely figured out what human consciousness actually really is. Human intelligence and consciousness is related to the whole human experience containing not only biology and emotions but also human history, social relationships, culture, languages, values, etc. It is practically impossible to program a machine that could deal with all that information in a flexible and adaptive human manner.

However, more realistic artificial intelligence like expert systems that can calculate good results from a huge amount of data do already work well and help people a lot, for example, when predicting weather. But again, those systems are not intelligent in the sense that they would be thinking anything in the human (or even animal) sense. They just repeat those algorithms and programs that humans have programmed them to follow.

Somehow I get the feeling that blind techno faith in the soon to come superb humanlike AI is almost magical in nature. Techno utopists are excited because of new smart looking machines, but may lose their sense of realism in their techno faith.

A calculator is basically still only a calculator, even if it is programmed to deal with many other kinds of information too than with simple numbers only.