ments be thrown to the wind - in light of the fact that careful, precise, step-by-step deductive arguments will be presented below for each and every proposition that might be cavalierly regarded prima facie implausible. Key Theses So, to put it colloquially, I think we're headed toward real izing Blade Runner, a classic sci fi movie in which only an elaborate pupil-scanner (which detects the usual physiolog ical correlate to an emotional response to provocative ques tions) enables one to distinguish androids from humans. And Blade Runner turned real, it seems to me, will be the Age of The...

Is human creativity a wall that AI can never scale? Many people are happy to admit that experts in many domains can be matched by either knowledge-based or sub-symbolic systems, but even some AI researchers harbor the hope that when it comes to feats of sheer brilliance, mind over machine is an unalterable fact. In this book, the authors push AI toward a time when machines can autonomously write not just humdrum stories of the sort seen for years in AI, but first-rate fiction thought to be the province of human genius. It reports on five years of effort devoted to building a story...

This text covers: setting the stage; the problem of imagery; the problem of consciousness; mathematizing betrayal; literary creativity and Church's Thesis; inside the mind of BRUTUS.

This is the first book-length presentation and defense of a new theory of human and machine cognition, according to which human persons are superminds. Superminds are capable of processing information not only at and below the level of Turing machines (standard computers), but above that level (the "Turing Limit"), as information processing devices that have not yet been (and perhaps can never be) built, but have been mathematically specified; these devices are known as super-Turing machines or hypercomputers. Superminds, as explained herein, also have properties no...

This is the first book-length presentation and defense of a new theory of human and machine cognition, according to which human persons are superminds. Superminds are capable of processing information not only at and below the level of Turing machines (standard computers), but above that level (the "Turing Limit"), as information processing devices that have not yet been (and perhaps can never be) built, but have been mathematically specified; these devices are known as super-Turing machines or hypercomputers. Superminds, as explained herein, also have properties no...

What Robots Can and Can't Be is a self-contained, rigorous, sustained argument for the unique, two-sided position that: (side one) Al will continue to produce machines with greater and greater capacity to pass stronger and stronger versions of the Turing Test; but that (side two) the Person Building Project' (the attempt by cognitive engineers to build a machine which is a person) will inevitably fail. The defense of side two rests in large part on a refutation of the proposition that persons are automata -- a refutation involving an array of issues, from free will to Godel to introspection...