Quote:
Originally Posted by Evil Chris
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Of course it's possible. Once we develop true artificial intelligence, the development of technology as a whole will explode within a matter of years.
The only problem is actually developing true artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, it's not quite as simple as people once thought. Human consciousness is embodied and embedded in physical reality. That is to say, we "outsource" a vast portion of our cognitive processes to the environment, and are attuned to the natural world in millions of different ways through many millions of years of evolution. So the simple functionalist approach we spent the latter half of the 20th century on is unlikely to lead to similar results.
To create truly creative AI, we need to surpass things that developed through evolution in vast amounts of time. Obviously, simply "inventing" something like that is possible. So, we would need to use a simulation of evolutionary processes to accomplish it. But since it took nature millions of years, it will cost us a rather large amount of time as well.
First we'll need to invent the technology necessary to run such simulations, then we'll need to build a framework of software to run them in, and finally, we'll need to run them. Combined, those things may well take another few centuries.