{"id":97794,"date":"2019-10-24T17:02:38","date_gmt":"2019-10-25T00:02:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/scientists-are-trying-to-build-a-conscious-machine-heres-why-it-will-never-work"},"modified":"2019-10-24T17:02:38","modified_gmt":"2019-10-25T00:02:38","slug":"scientists-are-trying-to-build-a-conscious-machine-heres-why-it-will-never-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/scientists-are-trying-to-build-a-conscious-machine-heres-why-it-will-never-work","title":{"rendered":"Scientists are trying to build a conscious machine \u2014 here\u2019s why it will never work"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward<\/a> building<\/a> a conscious machine<\/a>, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information<\/a>. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend US$1 billion on a project<\/a> to do just that.<\/p>\n

So far, though, attempts to build supercomputer brains have not even come close. A multi-billion-dollar European project<\/a> that began in 2013 is now largely understood to have failed<\/a>. That effort has shifted to look more like a similar but less ambitious project<\/a> in the U.S., developing new software tools for researchers<\/a> to study brain data, rather than simulating a brain.<\/p>\n

Some researchers continue to insist that simulating neuroscience with computers<\/a> is the way to go. Others<\/a>, like me, view these efforts as doomed to failure because we do not believe consciousness is computable<\/a>. Our basic argument is that brains integrate and compress multiple components of an experience, including sight and smell \u2013 which simply can\u2019t be handled in the way today\u2019s computers sense, process and store data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward building a conscious machine, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,6,44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience","category-robotics-ai","category-supercomputing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}