The cognitive era: Wither the machine brain - Tech Opinion The Star Online

It's almost inevitable, given dire warnings about the threat to the human race by some prominent commentators, including a billionaire and visionary entrepreneur, and one of the world's most prominent physicists, that you would associate Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the rise of the machines, aka, Skynet, aka the Terminator. Futurists predict that it's only a matter of time before we create a computer that's smarter than the human brain, and after that the very smart machines can create even smarter machines, eventually leapfrogging the capacity of human intelligence. It doesn't take a Hollywood imagination to predict the doomsday scenario of super smart computers creating machines with capabilities vastly beyond the human ken – after all, even the lowliest computer today can out-compute, at vastly superior speeds, the average human. Humans however, have always been able to think, and therefore outsmart fast, efficient computers programmed to do whatever they're programmed to do. Cognitive computing, artificial intelligence, machine learning systems, call it what you will, is on the cusp of a technology explosion.