I agree with The Evil Sponge. Computers are exponentially increasing in computing power every year or so. Even if computers never become sentient, we will continue to build faster computers and more flexible programs. Eventually, computers will be able to handle environmental interaction with at least the processing power of a single human. At this point, even if computers are only programmed to respond a specific way to a specific stimuli, they will become indestinguishable from man (to our perception). We may not have progressed humanoid robotics to the point where we can simulate the human body, but the female Customer Service agent you speak to on the phone my be nothing more than a box in a "clean room".
We may never be able to build computers that have human emotions, but does that make us superior? Should we really be trying to duplicate our primal emotions? Would we possibly be better off without them? Well, maybe not, I would miss curiosity.
I hated the end of bicentennial man. I did not understand why he would try to become more human. If he was lonely, fine, build more units similar to himself. He obviously had the knowhow to do the engineering (not to mention there would be schematics somewhere). Do not get me wrong, I do not consider man inferior to machines or vice versa, I just consider the two different species each with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Personally, I do not think an infinite storage capacity or processing ablility is needed for conciousness to develop. It only needs to be enough to handle the workload. I do not understand why it would not be possible (even preferable) for machines to download their daily memories/ thoughts into a central master system that crunches the data and feeds it back in a managable size (for instance, the computer downloads all of the recorded digital video data, but receives it back in a downsized version (without as much detail). After said amount of time the central system quits returning files that are never accessed.
On another note: Uncertainty and Randomness are not the same thing. Randomness means an equal chance that any particular value will be true. Uncertainty deals with the unknowable.
- KitNyx