A lot of people do believe that computers will one day surpass human beings in terms of what they can do and will, in fact, be superhuman. Computer engineer Robert J. Marks explains why this concern is misguided in his very interesting book Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will.See the post linked above for a partial list of what humans can do that machines will never be able to do.
According to Marks computers will never be human no matter how impressive their abilities may be. No machine will ever be able to match what humans are capable of.
Computers can impressively manipulate facts. They have knowledge, but as Marks explains on page 16 there's a difference between knowledge and intelligence:Knowledge is having access to facts. Intelligence is much more than that. Intelligence requires a host of analytic skills. It requires understanding: the ability to recognize humor, subtleties of meaning and the ability to untangle ambiguities.He writes:Artificial Intelligence has done many remarkable things....But will AI ever replace attorneys, physicians, military strategists, and design engineers, among others?The rest of the book is an entertaining explanation of why the answer is no.
In short, computers can only do what they're programmed to do and programs consist of algorithms developed by human agents. No one, however, can write an algorithm for the host of qualities and capabilities that humans have. They're non-algorithmic and thus non-computable.
Now the Discovery Institute has come out with a ten minute video as part of their Science Uprising series that's based on Marks' book and features him reiterating this same important point.
If you haven't seen any other videos in the series you might wonder about the Guy Fawkes mask worn by one of the characters. The masks have come to symbolize those who rebel against the current Zeitgeist, which, in the case of the Science Uprising series, is naturalistic materialism.
Here's the video:
