Epilogue

THE DAWN OF REAL MACHINE COGNITION

True machine cognition technology will succeed in areas where the symbolic processing of ‘good old-fashioned artificial intelligence’ (GOFAI) has so remarkably goofed. If it does not, then we have not understood and done it correctly. After all we do have one working example of a cognitive machine, the brain. Properly executed machine cognition should help us to proceed from the imperfect traditional information technologies to new levels of performance – processing with meaning. This will enable the transition from speech recognition to speech understanding, from pattern recognition to scene understanding, from sentence parsing to story understanding, from statistical ‘learning’ to cognitive learning and from numerical simulation to free imagination. Conscious autonomous robots will do things that humans cannot safely do; they will go to places where we cannot go. They will have experiences of their own. They will be able to share those experiences with us and in this way enhance the human experience. Perhaps someday a cognitive robot will ask ‘Where did I come from?’ and wonder that how can it be that those humans who, due to their biological nature, are not related to machines in any way, could possibly have given it a mind that can ponder its own existence.

Get Robot Brains: Circuits and Systems for Conscious Machines now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.