wopr

Apparently buckets of bolts are getting smarter, with some people believing that we are only 20 years away from a machine that is indistinguishable (mentally, at least) from a human:

Some far-out futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology evangelist in Wellesley Hills, a Boston suburb, predict that robots will match human intelligence by 2029, only 20 years from now. Other experts think that Kurzweil is wildly over-optimistic.

And we all know what will happen once machines get smart enough…
The irony of the situation is that, while it will be difficult, convincing the world that you have created a machine of equivalent intelligence to a human will not be impossible. No, the problem will be if (and I do mean “if” in the purely hypothetical context) the machine starts going apeshit and killing everything that moves – there are very few people on this world who would actually believe that. Oh, sure, ever since Karel Capek first coined the term “robot” (or, more accurately, “robotnik”), they have been an easy target for us meatbags to demonize into world-enslaving demon-masters, and Hollywood has made substantial amounts of money pursuing all of those various angles.
But that is exactly why people will not believe it – they will think it is some big advertising campaign, they will think it is a joke, they will think it is a new movie being filmed, they will think it is a hoax… But the absolutely last thing they think it will be is a real, honest-to-God mechanical revolution.
Of course, the same could be said for zombies… if some scientist stumbles across the discovery of how to reanimate dead tissue, and his creations embark on the all-you-can-eat buffet of BRAAAAIIIINNNNS that is the human species, few people will initially believe it, for much the same reasons.
Oh well. Just means more targets for the rest of us, right?