What’s the closest any computer and AI software combo can come to mimicking human intelligence these days?
Here’s a project from my Alma Mater:The Carnegie Mellon University Autonomous Land Vehicle Project (NAVLAB)
You probably shouldn’t assume that the smartest computer is the one that’s best at mimicking a human. There are some things that humans do much better than computers, but there are also some things that computers do much better than us.
In any event, I’d probably say that Google is the smartest, if you consider it all one system.
The short answer is that there are some computer programs out there that do one thing very well and they can get better at doing that thing over time. However, there’s nothing that’s even close to unseating us as the reigning champs of being good at multiple things.
How do you propose to compare Google’s skill at searching and the CMU car’s skill at automated navigation?
I don’t. But it should be noted that Google has some skill at automated navigation, too, at least in so far as finding routes. Part of the reason I’d choose Google is that it has a significant breadth of ability.
Route planning is not automated navigation, and Google’s search engine isn’t the same program as Google maps.
I would go with Google as well. The software is brilliant and, the last time I checked, just one of their world-wide data centers relies on 450,000 servers each.
But it’s just a big database - there is very little (if any) AI going on at all…
Ignore me, I’m just passing through.
That’s why I included the caveat “if you consider it all one system”. Of course, with computers, it’s less than straightforward to say what constitutes “one system”, and what’s multiple systems that just happen to interact.
Well, there’s certainly some cleverness in finding the relationships between those database elements. And a lot of what we consider “intelligence” in ourselves is also really just accumulated information.
If I may ask a related question that maybe gets more to the intent of the OP, what would you say is the most impressive computer program in terms of its abilities to do something that humans are typically better suited to than computers? That is, not counting tasks like searching a database or performing numerical integration that computers are obviously better suited to than humans.
How about BigDog?
(BTW - am I the only one who feels a little sorry for it when the guy kicks it and when it slips on the ice?)
The problem you run into here is that it’s really difficult to compare across tasks, as there’s significant differences in how hard some of the things we do are. You can point to the best unmanned vehicle, or the best facial recognition system, but it’s not clear that you can say which of those two is better.
I have seen that before but that thing is super-impressive. I can’t imagine what versions 2 and 3 will look like. Can you imagine an army of those with retractable helicopter blades and machine guns? I really wish they would put a head on it though even if it is just a stuffed doll. The thing looks like a psychotic, decapitated bison calf.
Funnily enough yes, skynet 
Declan