(01-26-2014, 02:33 AM)stevebowers Wrote: I think there will be many ways of achieving AI, including self-evolving a-life of this sort, as well as partial emulation of human and other animal minds, and perhaps simply designing minds from scratch (although this approach isn't getting very far at the moment). The end result will be a zoo of very different kinds of AI, some as self-aware as humans, some less so, and some with even more acute awareness of its internal state.
The one option that is specifically ruled out in OA is that Whole Brain Emulation and Uploading comes first; this seems to rule out Robin Hanson's scenario of an upload-driven economy, at least on the pre-nanoswarm Earth, although it has probably happened many times elsewhere in the Terragen Sphere.
Designing mind from scratch seems almost impossible to do unless mind in question is very simple (for baseline human).
At the moment emulation or evolution seems to provide better results when it comes to realism.
In emulation and evolution I count neural networks and evolutionary algorithms.