As I understand it, the way our brain works is that in a given situation our brain is bombarded with several possibilities extremely quickly, and using experience and our own intelligence we choose one of the several possibilities.
Is this true? If so, then can we create an AI that will talk to us like we talk to each other?
This is a question that's taken decades of research by some very intelligent people and still has no good answer.
I'll start with your question about the way the human brain works. While your point about being presented with several possibilities and picking the best one is true of part of the brain, you completely miss the rest of the complexity involved, namely how the brain gets the information about where it is, and how it makes the decision about what to do (let alone how it stores previous information). All these other components lead me to make the following statement with absolute certainty:
However complicated you think your brain is; it's more complicated than that.
Now onto the question about AI. 20/30 years ago, when we'd managed to get computers to solve the 'hard' problems like playing chess and solving differential equations (please note that these are considered 'hard' problems because the human brain isn't optimised for them, and they played into the preconceptions of intelligence held by academia at the time), AI researchers said 'oh, anytime now we'll have AI. We've only got the easy problems like speech and image recognition left'
These were considered easy tasks because the human brain has had tens of thousands of years (more, if you consider our full evolutionary tree) of optimising the structures of the brain to do them. If you actually think about it though, even doing something simple like looking at a cat and thinking 'that is a cat' is insanely complex. We think it's easy, because we're built to do it, but in actual fact we've got millennia of trial and error behind us, driven by the small mammals that had to look at predators and go 'that is a dinosaur' to avoid being eaten. We've had millions of years. AI research has not had millions of years. This is known as Moravec's Paradox
But the answer to your question is actually fairly simple: Yes. We will. As long as humanity keeps driving towards having an 'intelligent' AI, we're effectively keeping up an enforced 'evolutionary' pressure on the various prototypes and AI models to develop. Researchers will combine various parts of models to create better AI's (roughly analogous to breeding) and the weak will be discarded, while the stronger AI's will continue to contribute to the next generation.
In that manner, we should quickly (for a somewhat geological value of quick) start to see AI's that exhibit traits that humans want, like being able to hold a conversation or make a decent cup of coffee martini. Whether we see anything else (like true free will) is a matter for a different debate.
While human brains are more complex in many ways than our most advanced modern computers, there is no scientifically justifiable reason to think that anything a human can do is simply impossible for a sufficiently advanced computer. We don't know exactly how long it's going to take, as we don't fully understand the human brain, but based on our advances to date we can get an idea that it could well be within 50 years that we get a a very interesting two-way conversational AI.
What helps this is that the human brain is not 100% for conversation. Much of the brain is used for every other thing a human does, from sight and hearing to movement to keeping us from falling over dead. While it should logically take far longer to replicate a human brain, there is no reason we we can't have various degrees of intelligence and behaviors far sooner than what it would take to have the first fully artificially created human brain equivalent device.
Indeed, in many ways we already have recreated many otherwise "human only" or even "beyond human" abilities. We have computers that can recognize faces even across dozens of years of aging, translate human language with some facility, navigate through 3D space, and many other highly difficult tasks - like winning on Jeopardy or at Chess.
The trick is that we don't have computer systems that can do all of that at once, weaving them all together seamlessly. That's just too much for our present level of development, and there's still plenty of things humans can do intellectually that have no equivalent computer expression. Some things we just haven't figured out, and may not figure out for many, many years.
Now, if you consider intelligence as the full range of human intellectual ability, that's going to take a whole lot of advancement. But if you accept the concept of "materialism" (the philosophy, not the "I love owning stuff" concept) as opposed to something like "dualism", then it's just a matter of time. If there is no magic pixie dust that makes humans intelligent, there's no reason a silicon-based thing can't be developed to have equal or greater intelligence.
How long is that going to take? Beats the heck out of me! It's not possible to know, because we don't know how hard the problems are to solve until we've pretty much solved them.
I do not think that we will ever develop an artificial AI that can rival human thought in its most important facet.
Mind you, we already have systems that can surpass humans in many areas such as have been mentioned by other posts here - solving integral equations, computation, applying game theory, etc. But these are all applications of deductive or even inductive reasoning. There is another type of thinking that the human mind can do which is beyond computational ability and which I think will be forever beyond the ability of computers. This is abductive reasoning, or creative thinking.
Think for example of Max Planck. Faced with the ultra-violet catastrophe, a problem that was baffling the physicists of his time, he came to a point where he said he was ready to forsake every previously held conviction about physics. It was only then that he came up with the equation that would give birth to quantum physics (E=hfc). This equation breaks with everything we knew to that point about physics. Its implication, as would later be worked out, is that energy naturally occurs not in a smooth gradient, but in chunks - quanta. That is, energy has particle properties.
That sort of leap that denies past knowledge and gives birth to a paradigm shift, it is the same sort of "thinking" or creating that goes on when an artist composes a strikingly beautiful piece of music or astounding painting. A conceptual entity was not there, and then it was, in the mind of its creator. This is where our mind goes beyond our brain. It is not a matter of being able to do more computations per second, or store more bits of information - it is not a quantitative difference. It is a qualitative difference between the human mind and the computer brain.
Think of it like this.... Consider an average human composer who has studied music theory and is able to consistently and mechanically produce acceptable music. Now consider Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who composes page after page of flawless music, music that broke with tradition and yet is still admired centuries later. What is the difference? Will we ever be able to teach a machine to be a Mozart? We can't even teach a human to be a Mozart or a Max Planck; what would make us think we can build a machine capable of competing, much less surpassing them?
How do we impart the ability to create, to make an unwarranted logical leap, to create something out of nothing? This is the thing that will forever be beyond our ability to build into an automaton.
No. It's not true. The reality of how our brain works is enormously more complicated than that. There are small subsections of rat brains that we have determined can be well modeled the way you describe, but the brain itself is actually so much more complicated that it almost defies capturing in words.
Create an AI that can talk to us? ABSOLUTELY. Compared to the greater challenge of making a thinking machine, conversation is actually a relatively simple topic. In fact, it was the subject of the most famous test of AI in the world, the Turing Test. Every year, many computer programs try their best to communicate with a panel, who try to guess if they are computers or humans (half of the "programs" are actually humans behind the scenes acting like programs). Often, some of them do remarkably well. Verbal intonation is still tricky. The Turing Test depends on text still, but we're already on the road.
Can we make an AI think? That's an open ended question. Science has yet to provide an answer, and science fiction has gone every which direction with the idea. We honestly aren't 100% in agreement as to what it actually means to "think," so it's been hard to extrapolate to see if its in the limits of science and engineering's capacities.
Yes, you can make an AI emulating the most people
No there always will be a person whose behavior is impossible to predict or emulate using a machine. You would need a hypercomputing device (which is physically impossible).
See Thomas Breuer "Impossibility or universally valid theories".
YES.
What you are describing is basically true, in other words I get the general idea of it. Lots of sensory goes it, it gets processed, then decisions come out.
Bioengineering erases the boundary between classical computers and the human brain. In the same way that scientists grow living tissues in laboratories for grafting and even organ replacement, we could grow brain tissue. And similar to how a mouse brain on a petri dish can fly a plane, lab-grown brain tissue could potentially be used to make intelligent computers.
The engineered brains will eventually become "better" than human brains, either by making them bigger, more efficient, more specialized, or a combination of all these things.
Yes. But not only will it rival our intelligence it will surpass us and quickly eclipse our ability to comprehend what it tells us.
An AI does not have to have the preconceptions and limitations we humans do.
The most important abilities an intelligence needs is to learn (input and memory), organize knowledge (relevant recall) and reconfigure its own programming.
We already have many algorithms for deduction and reasoning so once we figure out how to get a machine to do those things an AI will quickly emerge.
And once it learns how to learn better (and leaves behind our feeble efforts at programming), it will become an ASI (Artificial SUPER Intelligence).
