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I think you're being a little short-sighted with that comment.
At the end of the day, humans are just electrical impulses too. Just a very highly evolved mess of electrical pathways.

Plus emotions aside, all our senses (heat, touch, sight, etc) have all been recreated by technology.

In terms of the software: people often forget that humans take years before they're "intelligent" and twice as long before they reach adult intelligence. So we're literally talking YEARS of 100% up time and data input! No software in the world has had that level of development - so it's hardly surprising that software seems incapable of reaching human awareness.

As for the logic behind the software: humans aren't all too different from computers in the sense that we too make millions of decisions a second (we're just not usually aware of them).
eg: you ask someone, "do you fancy a cup of tea or coffee?" and a persons answer would be based on:
* are they thirsty?
* do they prefer tea or coffee?
* do they like they way how tea/coffee is prepared by the requestor?
* have they drank lots of tea or coffee recently so fancy a change?
...and so on.

Calculations like that are possible to program into a computer. The hard part is getting a computer to program in those calculations itself based it's own "life" experiences (remember my earlier comment regarding humans having an up time of years before their in any way "intelligent"? Now imagine having to record that into a computer on top of programming the core routines!)


So in short: it may well be possible in the future. But currently AI software is in it's infancy and needs to evolve.

Personally, I think if people want AI to be a workable goal, then the only way to over come the biggest obstacle (ie the impossible up time before the software becomes "intelligent") would be to standardise an AI database thus each developer wouldn't be required to individually record years of a computers life to build a personality/reference model - they could just share each others and divide the work load/up time.

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.