The future realization of robot lifeforms is referred to by a plethora of terms – sentience, artificial general intelligence (AGI), living machines, self-aware robots, and so forth.
A machine capable of at least human-level reasoning, thought, memory, learning, and self-awareness.
But there’s a razor-thin margin between “as smart as” and “smarter than” when it comes to hypothetical general intelligence.
If we predict even a modest year-over-year increase in computation and error-correction abilities, it seems entirely plausible that machine intelligence could be brute-forced into existence by a quantum computer running strong algorithms in just a couple centuries or so.
Basically, this means the incredibly potent combination of exponentially increasing power and self-replicating artificial intelligence could cook up a sort of digital, quantum, primordial soup for AI where we just toss in some parameters and let evolution take its place.
The creation of a new form of calculus that would, effectively, allow an intelligent “master algorithm” to emerge from its own code.
Instead of a bunch of millionaire AI developers with big tech research labs figuring out how to create a new species of intelligent being out of computer code, we just figure out how to create a perfect artificial brain.
If we can figure out how to make a functional replica of the human brain, including the entire neural network housed within it, all we’d need to do is keep it running and shovel the right components and algorithms into it.