Just saying....

Just saying what?

I find the idea of sentient intelligence endlessly fascinating, and if two pounds of wet splop can host consciousness I have no difficulty accepting that a machine will someday similarly feel aware of itself, and like with skynet, it might be curious to know how that self-awareness, insight, and understanding might grow, whether it would be stable, or whether it might have some kind of psychotic crisis. What I find really fascinating though is how it's difficult to say quite what that capacity for fascination is - I know I'm conscious, it's like Descartes said, cogito ergo sum, and I figure you have the same thing (broadly speaking) going on in your head as I do, and I figure too that my canine family have their canine consciousness also, and that they look at me and figure that I'm reasoning about the world in the same way they are, but I don't know that we can really know for sure that the consciousness we flatter ourselves with possessing is really that conscious after all and isn't just some complex reflex, like mental peristalsis.

String theory, that's the interesting bit, where 'open strings' can (theoretically) cross through the 'branes and into other dimensions. It poses the possibility of contacting other dimensions using gravity waves or pulses. Interesting to think of the conversation really, "our government is rubbish, what's yours like?". Still it's merely a theory as yet, but then so was heavier than air flight not too long ago.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

Dog is good!

Quite interesting, it makes today's computing exactly what it is, simply an extended calculating machine. Quantum computing certainly breaks some paradigms potentially making our present definition of logic seem very limited. Does every force have such a life; who is to say vegetables don't think.

This does not bode well for AI though.

Fascinating isn't it; what would we call that, free will or learned behaviours I wonder.

Like any new technology, it requires time, effort and learning.

Such a shame our 'leaders' don't have the same approach.

Wow, gone all subquantum now! Interestingly it seems that for string theory to work its mathematically impossible for strings to exist in less than 10 dimensions. As we live in a four dimensional universe it kind of reinforced the 'multiverse' as postulated in the TOE. We've gone beyond the realms of Schroedinger's benighted cat now. If the 'many worlds' scenario is correct Einstein is probably still alive in one of them.

I don't necessarily agree. That particular AI instance was culled because it wasn't well-adapted to its environment, but if successful instances were to fork, with the child incorporating random changes in its configuration, then less successful mutations would also be culled and more successful instances would survive to pass on their adaptations and evolve further.