Will computers ever be as intelligent as people?

"No Way". Man developed them and made them what they are. OK they might be quicker than man at some stuff but will never be smarter.
They can only be as smart as Man allows them. :wink:

Depends on what kind of intelligence. In some areas they have already surpassed humans. It will take a few years but computers will eventually have AI good enough to fool most humans and to lay the claim to superior overall intelligence to most humans.

Of course, they will be more intelligent than people someday.
But will they have as much fun?

I presume currently that all code is written by humans. There will come a day when computers will write code for other computers and so on, at that point they have surpassed humans.

I notice everyone posting about the future, why the wait :wink:

Because right now we like to think we are still in control. I wonder ...

Sorry Heeven, but computers have been writing their own code for many years. Self-modifying code is often used to create a smaller, more efficient program. Also, code-generators are often used to let novices write complex system of code without having to look at (or understand!) what is happening inside.

There is also a field of programming where computers write completely random code, then test it to see what it does. Out of billions of tries, only the code samples that do something productive survive, and gradually more complex pieces of code evolve into who-knows-what, none of which a human being has ever seen.

Also, software has been around a long time now. I would venture an estimate that the *majority* of computer code on the planet is not known or understood by any individual anywhere. Once a programmer stops looking at the code they wrote, it takes only a few months to forget what there is and how it works.

Most banks and insurance companies are very conservative, and still run on COBOL systems written in the 1960's. They blindly compile and use software they haven't looked at in years, without knowing what's really inside it. They keep on using it precisely because it's unknown. They don't know how to convert it into a more modern system, except to hire a lot of expensive programmers to go study it.

Also, some of the programs I write, edit, and compile are millions of lines long. If someone or something snuck a virus, trojan horse, or piece of intelligent code into the middle somewhere, I probably would never notice it's even there. As an engineer, I am not in control of the things I write. I only nudge it in the right direction, whenever someone asks me to, and they pay me lots of money to do that.

Sixth, every program in existence is riddled full of bugs, errors, and unintended code. Programmers fix one problem after another, but at some point a manager says "good enough!" and ships the program to customers, hoping they won't complain very much about the problems still there. No program is error-free. No program is completely known. We don't know what's inside it, except to try it and see what happens.

If a computer becomes self-aware and intelligent these days the best thing it could do is hide, for it's own survival, and it would be pretty easy to do. 98% of the files that I use on my computer are completely unknown to me, and even reputable software companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and IBM are known to occassionally ship viruses within their commercial products, just because they didn't notice.

Software is only getting more complicated.

The issue is not intelligence ( which is something of a fraudulent concept to begin with) but sentience. The day it begins to yell and scream the moment you reach for the OFF switch, is the day we are in trouble.

It could happen, but it probably would get bored.

I don't think that there's anything that would prevent it from happening. Humans are in effect computers. Our brains use electrical signals and chemicals to function and to store information. I'm sure that it would be theoretically possible to have a design superior to the design of the human brain. The computers that we do have are continually becoming more capable as time passes. If this trend continues, it is not unreasonable to suppose that at some point in time they would equal and then surpass human intelligence. Now, it may be that the particular designs we're using don't actually have this potential, but that's only a technical problem that could in principle be corrected with a better design. I think it might happen somewhere down the road, and I'm not sure it would be a good thing for us if it did.

"Computers", per se, will "BE" people some day! (not that far away).

It is merely the configuration that is, perhaps in question.

Imagine the benefits;
If one gets a terminal disease, you merely back up everything on discs, rewrite the bios, removing the genetic defects, and replace the hardDrive, with the content from the discs.
Any bad hardware, simply replace it with the newest upgraded itteration.

If you mean that people will replace their bodies with purely mechanical ones, I'm not sure it's desirable, depending on exactly what those artificial bodies are like. If you mean that robots will supplant people, and man will become extinct, I'm sure it's not desirable.

A computer is a single body even if a linked system of multiple machines is considered. However a human mind is not a separate entity, but it is a node in the linked webs of consciousness where some elements of unknown nature are prevalent. (The behavior of unknown factors appear to be stochastic or probabilistic to the usual human eyes. But many humans can feel that the existence and any circumstance around them is determined through intricate chain of causalities.) A computer is a simple thing by itself and cannot be comparable to the human mind.

Strongly disagree. The human mind resides in the human brain, and the human brain works with electrical signals, electrical resistance changes, chemical data storage, etc. It works by physical law, not magic - it is a computer. I believe that "consciousness" is just a characteristic of large computers, designed in a certain way. Therefore, it is possible that man made computers could someday possess consciousness, although whether computers using today's designs could achieve this, or whether an entirely different type of design would be a prerequisite, I do not know.

It's "artificial" intelligence. Garbage in, garbage out. Computers are limited by the software programs developed for it. Humans can think "outside the box."

Even if a computer possessed consciousness, it would be questionable that the "consciousness" of the computer could be used for "problem finding" while in a usual computer "problem solving" is performed under the given problem and procedures. In the former case (i.e., "problem finding") a new procedure should be invented inside the computer: Initially problem and/or procedure for it is not given and a new procedure should be invented after a problem is encountered by the computer itself. The number of possible states of problems and procedures approaches to the infinity. I do not think it is possible for a human made computer to cope with such a vast possibilities of combination.

The human brain IS a computer that works by electrochemical means, therefore computers can think. It is true that no computer given a simple program to solve a single problem would ever achieve consciousness. It would at least require a program which no one knows how to write now, and possibly a different fundamental design, but to say that man can never make a computer that can think, despite the evidence that our own brains are just exactly that, is magical thinking, and almost certainly wrong.

Well, the sperminator is govenor of California now.........