1. It'snot April 1st.

2. Daily Mail? Hmm.

3. That'll be the day the human race is extinct.

Headline written by the same people who named that TV series "Are you smarter than a 5th grader"? Begging the question of what "smart" means.

Yep, looks like computers will eventually can haz the cheeseburgers.

>In 2029 robots will be able to flirt, crack jokes

In turing test fashion, hopefully.

There was a prediction in the sixties that by the turn of the millenium we'd be in flying cars...

Kurzweil, 66, who is considered by some to be the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) visionary, is recognised by technologists for popularising the idea of "the singularity" – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge. Google hired him at the end of 2012 to work on the company's next breakthrough: an artificially intelligent search engine that knows us better than we know ourselves.

Kurzweil's prediction comes hot on the tail of revelations that Google is in the throes of assembling the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth.

Read more at [theguardian.com...]

artificial intelligence

It is not as stimulating as the real thing.

Same goes for flirting.

...

I don't believe it. Even many humans often have difficulty recognizing sarcasm, irony, parody, lies, insinuations, etc. Human communication is far too subtle for a computer to be able to achieve the same level of understanding.

Guess the new algorithm twiddling hasn't worked out well and the plebs need to be distracted again? If it starts mentioning "Star Trek computer", you know things are really bad. :)

Regards...jmcc

>>I don't believe it.

To me, the only thing in question here is the timing.

1. I expect that 15 years is on the optimistic end

2. Computers are already "smarter" than people for many, many tasks. As time goes by the number of those tasks increases.

3. CAPTCHA uses three different sorts of obfuscation (noise, distortion and boundary violation if memory serves). Computers are already better at filtering for noise and distortion than humans. They will soon be better than humans at all three, meaning that a "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" (which is what CAPTCHA stand for) will betray computers because they will solve CAPTCHAs that are too *hard* for humans. The challenge for spammers will be figuring out the degree to which they have to dumb down their CAPTCHA cracking algos to make the machines look like humans.

4. Many people said a computer would never beat a human at chess.

5. Many people said a computer would never beat a human at Jeopardy.

They interesting question isn't "When will computers be smarter than people?" but rather "What is the last aspect of the human intellect that a computer will duplicate and surpass?"

Human communication is far too subtle for a computer

Frankly, it most comes down to computing speed and database size. I expect that in my lifetime, comedians will be delivering computer-generated jokes on late night TV.

I can believe that the first AI researched and written newspaper will launch in the next 5 years.

I imagine it will be a bit rough around the edges.

"Interviews", for example, will be no more sophisticated than comments scraped from social feeds and then cited with attribution - but that's equivalent to what often gets reported from an interview in a human written piece, anyway.

Remarking on today's events in Kyiv, 4 years after the public ousting of President Yanukovych, Ukraine's Foreign Minister Yevgenia Tymoshenko declared "[Diaspora* comment here]". In L'viv one Ukrainian schoolteacher commented "[App.Net comment here]" while citizens in the Crimean port of Sevastopol reflected on "[Twitter comment here]" and "[Instagram comment here]".