AI isn’t a weird idea. Most people are familiar with robots via science fiction and popular culture. Most people, I’m sure, don’t find the notion of a “thinking machine” all that farfetched; as one presenter at the Second Singularity Summit pointed out, humans are capable of anthropomorphizing rocks, at least on a sentimental level. But regardless of how easy it is to imagine human-type intelligence (or “general intelligence”) in something that isn’t actually human, we humans still haven’t figured out how to create anything like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, or even Hal from 2001. Continue reading