So when will the day come,

When programmers aren't needed anymore and we just tell robots to do the programming? If I were you guys I'd be scared for your jobs. If you don't have a job, then these robots would make your existence pointless anyway.

Who maintains the robots.

Other robots?

Who maintains the robot robot maintainers?

Other robots?

...

...

...

...

...

Humans.

Why would you use a robot to program? That's stupid.

>>29
They maintain each other, like humans do.

>>29
Doctors.

Have a nice day. :-)

>>31,32

But we didn't establish already that there will be other robots are are able to maintain themselves and code or robots that can heal other robots?!

The OP specifically said robots who could program.

I see you two don't have that much attention to detail which is kind of disappointing......

I'm not worried. I'm actually working with genetic algorithm and self-learning AI research.

I'll MAKE those robots, get rich in the process and won't have to work anyway.

>>24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f477FnTe1M0

>>23
I think you're a bit confused.

Considering that we haven't got a clue how conciousness functions how can we build an AI?

There are 2 problems concerning consciousness.

The "simple" one, which is merely how cognitive functions work, how "thoughts" are generated, and so on. The "simple" problem is merely about understanding the physical processes at work at the low-level (physical processes that make neurons work, and interactions between them) and at the high-level (interactions between functional blocks of the brain, and so on - even if in reality there is a continuity between regions, and there is no clear delimiter). There are a lot of books talking about the low-level processes and some which attempt to construct high-level theories (some of which are quite logical and possibly how we actually work).
The "hard" problem of consciousness is the existential one: what it is "to be like something", it concerns our perception and the nature of qualia. There is nothing physical that indicates we have qualia. It's either that it's an illusion and this raw/basic form of consciousness doesn't exist, it being an illusion caused by our brain, and we are just hardwired to believe in it (See "Consciousness Explained" by Daniel Dennett for this view), or that this type of consciousness is a property of the world we live in (either non-physical (see David Chalmers' "The Conscious Mind") or pyshical (see Penrose's books, since this appears to be your viewpoint)).
The view Dennett gives is rather logical and might be how it actually works, however I find it terribly hard to believe in, as that's probably how I'm hardwired to be.
The view Chamlers gives is a bit more interesting, in which it supposes that consciousness would just form in any system organized so that it would form, and that system would experience qualia and so on - it's not something you need to engineer at all, it just appears naturally and is a basic property of everything in the world.
The view that Penrose/Searle givesis actually the hardest to stomach for me and it's one of the most unpopular views (the one which you seem to think it's true: consciousness is due to quantum entanglement), and assuming his view would be true, it would lead to some really unlikely conclusions).
Current research points to conciousness requiring quantum entanglement, that means we are a long long long time away from any processing power of that sort.
I'd really like a citation on this. The only one that seems to  believe this is Penrose, and this view is highly unpopular.

You should read the literature and draw your own conclusions on this problem.

However, regardless of what point of view you take on this "hard" problem of consciousness, you will notice that it's not required at all for building (strong) AIs. The only thing that will change is wether you think that such AIs can achieve a similar consciousness to yours or not. It doesn't mean that such AIs can't achieve the same level of intelligence as you, or much better.

I'd also like to understand why do you think understanding consciousness completely (the hard problem, especially) is of any importance to building general AIs? It may be something we humans are puzzled about, but I really doubt it has any importance on wether we can build them or not.

I've been loosely following various neuroscience and AI research and I do think we'll be able to achieve human-level intelligence AIs within 50 years or less (probably much less), and I'd also be interested in doing research in some of these fields (and some related ones) someday.

>>33
>>29-san posits these robot-maintaining robots just so, attention-to-detail-sama.

>>36
Holy shit, five star post nigga.
You made of rethink a lot of stuff.

>>38
What's a ``post nigga''?

>>39
See, your inability to undertand this jive talk is what stops you getting invited to parties.

>>40
You make it sound as if going to the parties were something desirable.

>>41
No, being at the parties is something desirable. Going to them can be a bit of a chore.

>>42
Being at a party sounds desirable. What happens there?

>>39
It's the next version of a homie, the avant guarde nigga of yesterday.

>>36
Because Penrose/Hameroff and I share similar 'unpopular' views does not mean we are incorrect, I only have to cite heliocentrism to prove that.

As for breaking down conciousness into two problems I feel you are avoiding the point, how can you be so brazen as to de-construct something into two domains when we have no understanding of the actual domain? Fair enough we have observational data but that leads to us simulating human behaviour(s). If that's what you want, fine, I don't disagree with that.

I held the same opinion as you 10 years ago, after reading shadows of the mind I couldn't get the issue of paramecium out of my head. Also I would suggest you hold off throwing around claims of "human-level intelligence AIs within 50" this makes you sound like a TV scientist. I feel Orch-OR is a step in the right direction, there is something there that we don't understand, research into this area is a good thing.

Although they are not mutually exclusive, there is a difference between 'unpopular' and 'unsubstantiated and stupid.'

>>45
It would be nice/interesting if our brains would be capable of quantum computing of some form, however such claims are lacking evidence, and the evidence that was found seems to indicate the contrary. It is widely believed that our brains are mostly deterministic and we lack "free will"(whatever that is), and most evidence suggests this. Even if we were to assume that quantum computing of some sort was possible in the brain, that still doesn't show that it has anything to do with the way we experience consciousness.

As for the separation of consciousness into 2 problems, let's take an idealized scenario (non-real world scenario, although likely possible in a simulation) where you could know everything about each neuron's state, you would be able to see how the information flows through the system and how the data is "processed". What we perceive as consciousness depends (if not, IS) on the state of some parts of the system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_correlates_of_consciousness ). However, even if we knew how all the data flowed, and even if we would be able to reconstruct things such as what we see, what we imagine, what we hear, etc (conscious perception), it would still not account for the "hard problem", since we experience things rather continously (even if they are not), and to actually reconstruct such perceptions, we would have to know exactly how each part that plays any role in some perception actually works. The brain is fairly decentralized, and for example processing visual input is done in fairly small chunks with the information being more compressed and centralized as it moves from V1 to V2 To V4 to IT and toward the prefrontal cortex, yet what we experience is fairly continuous and coherent, as we are able to experience the state of the entire system at once (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem), it may be an illusion, or it may be something else, but all these questions about how "it is to be like something" represent the "hard problem of consciousness", because if you were to inspect the system only by its behaviour, you would see no evidence of this at all... the only reason we even consider the existence of this problem is because that's how we experience the world.

>>43
Drunken women happen at parties.