questions like “what is the meaning of life?” will be practical engineering questions. uh... I've heard that from another science fiction writer somewhere... n

questions like “what is the meaning of life?” will be practical engineering questions. uh... I've heard that from another science fiction writer somewhere... now what happened with that? I don't think we have been becoming better at "outsourcing our cognition" (though it's an inspiring goal). I've tried to do this as much as possible in my own life, and I've found I'm much more effective when I don't do it at all (the most effective outsourcing is to try to articulate one's idea to someone else - but they don't need to actually do anything). This lack of gradual increase means there's no extrapolation to further increase, let alone an exponentially increasing acceleration into a singularity - not, at least, for me :-(. Mechanizing conceptual understanding remains difficult. Although we human beings are good at modularizing knowledge (it's what we constantly do), and it looks like it should be straightforward to automate, we haven't managed it, at all. So many times in history, people have thought they are on the verge of it... Did you know that Mr Boolean originally called his algebra the "Rules of Thought"? What he did was very cool, and you can see what he meant, but... it's such an awfully long way from "thought". I think it's possible to create human level intelligence (and probably faster and broader - but maybe not any deeper); we just have no idea how. And machines that are 16,000 times faster (21 Moore years) aren't going to help with that, in themselves. But it would be awesome. (My masters was on statistical inference of pattern, without predetermined patterns, and taking into account the complexity of the pattern sought. I chose this as the closest approach to automating thought. We are a long way away, IMHO).