This brings to my mind an interesting line of thought that I ran across via Peter Watts writing about it in Blindsight [1]. In that link, page down to the "Sentience/Intelligence" header, and read that section for a concise introduction to this line of thought: sentience is separate from intelligence. Looking at what computer science research and industry has accomplished thus far, I'm very open-minded about the idea that sentience (feeling and perceiving) is a separate, older, deeper layer of brain processing from sapience (reasoning and intelligence).
I suspect at a layman's comprehension level that sapience is mostly what we are reproducing in research and industry today, and not sentience, because sentience is far more difficult to plumb. Your explanation of the challenges in quantum methods of simulation and the uncertainty on whether it is even necessary seems to bring up this line of questioning to me. This has interesting ramifications. Like we can build OCR and even put out of work lots of formerly middle-class attorneys who made their living in trial discovery phases. But we have yet to create a second Industrial Revolution with general purpose humanoid-form robots that everyone can own that can clean houses, mow lawns, fold clothes, make beds, wash and chop vegetables, pick strawberries, etc., all supposedly "simple" tasks.
I think this is right on. People use rational thought to evaluate decisions, but they use emotions to make decisions. If you take away a person's ability to feel emotions, they become paralyzed with indecision. There are at least a few real-world examples that have been studied.
There's a strong argument that our rational intelligence evolved to serve the drive to survive--and that emotions are the signals of that drive. It's becoming more clear that even though most animals aren't capable of symbolic reasoning and language, they do experience emotions and make decisions accordingly.
Who is programming a computer to feel emotions? I'm not aware of any significant work in the direction. (If anyone is, please link it!)
>* Who is programming a computer to feel emotions? I'm not aware of any significant work in the direction. (If anyone is, please link it!)*
Affectiva is working on reading emotions, and there is some philosophy work on whether or not an AI can feel emotions [1]. A Russian group claims they will release an emotional robot around 2018, but scant details on what that even means [2]. More scholarly work [3] [4] [5] is ongoing, but slow going.
I'm not sure what you are responding to, but general-purpose humanoid robots that could be shown how to do things like picking strawberries (rather than a purpose-built strawberry picker) would literally be the world's biggest industry by staggering margins overnight.
The money is in both, and arguably there are greater knock-on effects from automating "labor for those tasks is so cheap to make robots uncompetitive price wise".
A humaniform robot imbued with sentience and what little progress we've made on (emulating?) sapience is sufficient to substantially (not entirely replace) disrupt the human labor demand from the following industries.
* Residential lawn care for Single Family Residences, a $10B annual industry in the US alone. http://bit.ly/2eu4Ulm
* Residential maid service, a $30B annual industry in the US alone. http://bit.ly/2eSQ3oL
* Residential home senior health care, a $180B annual industry in the US alone. http://bit.ly/1ufk95Y
* If residential meal prep and cooking were mostly or possibly entirely automated, then that can convert the personal chef
industry from hundreds of millions into one that poaches a significant portion of the $780B fast casual industry.
http://bit.ly/2dJweO0
That's just four industries, with a combined annual revenue of $1T in the US alone, with tremendous consumer demand. There are lots of other possible industries that can be disrupted with such a "simple" robot, especially in the commercial sectors, and globally. It is not a stretch to say such a robot is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
Suppose you offer a $100K humaniform robot with OTA software updates that can perform most household chores, geofence young children into a specific locality, and basically the sense range, kinesthetic sense of a human, object recognition depth of current AI software, but with only the sapience of what we associate with AI today. Amortize the payments over 30 years, and I expect a billion households will beat a path to your door and happily pay that amount.
It would be hard to predict the knock-on economic and other effects of the development of mass-produced personal household robots. Probably similar to trying to predict the demand upon lithium supplies a century from when the Model T was introduced. Perhaps something similarly unexpected like divorce rates dramatically drop due to fewer domestic disputes over household chores because most of those chores disappear.
My thesis is that the people building robots are not dumb, and already realize the financial potential in figuring out sentience, and already are aware at some level that the sentience I speak of is incredibly difficult to build because we understand so little about it, and the AI field focuses upon coming in at the problem from the sapience angle/level for the good reason that sapience is closer to our current form of computer technology than sentience.
I suspect at a layman's comprehension level that sapience is mostly what we are reproducing in research and industry today, and not sentience, because sentience is far more difficult to plumb. Your explanation of the challenges in quantum methods of simulation and the uncertainty on whether it is even necessary seems to bring up this line of questioning to me. This has interesting ramifications. Like we can build OCR and even put out of work lots of formerly middle-class attorneys who made their living in trial discovery phases. But we have yet to create a second Industrial Revolution with general purpose humanoid-form robots that everyone can own that can clean houses, mow lawns, fold clothes, make beds, wash and chop vegetables, pick strawberries, etc., all supposedly "simple" tasks.
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm#Notes