Humans season 2

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This season looks like it will address the possibility that A.I.s will achieve human sentience and what the ramifications of that will be. In the 'real world' A.I. scientists and researchers are examining this possibility. At the moment it's more of a 'philosophical' question since the computing power now available, necessary to achieve what might be considered to be sentience, is orders of magnitude lower than required, even as that level is unknown. A recent issue of Analog goes into this with a detailed summary of the 'state of the art' and opinions of experts in the field.

Most believe that it will be sheer computing power that will eventually mimic sentience, if at all possible, rather than some sort of electronic/organic breakthrough wherein the A.I. actually achieves sentience on some sort of 'soul level'. No one can envision how this could happen, given that we don't have enough understanding at present as to how the human brain operates on all, deepest, levels.

But the bottom line is that eventually a high enough functioning A.I. will be developed that enables it to operate at 'human levels' in whatever endeavors it is assigned, and the question of sentience will be moot.

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This seems 'blue sky' on several levels and there is some outright falsehoods such as this :

"Musk explained what he meant by saying that computers can communicate at "a trillion bits per second", while humans, whose main communication method is typing with their fingers via a mobile device, can do about 10 bits per second. "  

Humans 'main communication method'  is actually speaking to another human using a technique called "voice".  How many bits per second it takes to do this, no one really knows but it's higher than any electronic technique.

Wait ! I don't know what I was thinking . The frequency range of the human voice is so low that the bits per second would also be very low in order to transmit/reproduce, less than 10 K per second, but the various methods are too complicated to cite here.

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The Oct. 2016 issue of Analog is the one to read to get a good overview of the state of thinking on A.I.  There is at present 3 levels of A.I.,  weak, strong, and 'super intelligence'.  This article doesn't use the term 'super intelligence' but an example would be 'Skynet' as featured in the Terminator movies.

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At present all of our A.I. would be considered 'weak'.   The 'Synths' in Humans would be an example of strong A.I. , also the android in the movie 'Ex Machina' who escaped the lab and went out into the world.

Some earlier remarks by Musk:

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Some good articles here:

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