- Nick Bostrom
- Ray Kurzweil
- Cory Doctorow
- Dr. Douglas R. Hofstadter
- Stewart Brand
- Dr. Selmer Bringsjord
- Dr. Rodney Brooks
- Jamais Cascio
- Dr. Hubert Dreyfus
- Bill Gates
- Dr. Ben Goertzel
- Dr. Stephen Hawking
- Dr. Daniel Hillis
- Bill Joy
- Jaron Lanier
- Pamela Mccorduck
- Bill McKibben
- Dr. Marvin Minsky
- Dr. Hans Moravec
- Ramez Naam
- Martin Rees
- Glenn Harlan Reynolds
- Dr. John Searle
- Dr. Vernor Vinge
Dr. John Searle
Slusser Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley
'Could a machine think?' My own view is that only a machine could think, and indeed only very special kinds of machines, namely brains and machines that had the same causal powers as brains. And that is the main reason strong AI has had little to tell us about thinking, since it has nothing to tell us about machines. By its own definition, it is about programs, and programs are not machines. Whatever else intentionality is, it is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation, photosynthesis, or any other biological phenomena. No one would suppose that we could produce milk and sugar by running a computer simulation of the formal sequences in lactation and photosynthesis, but where the mind is concerned many people are willing to believe in such a miracle because of a deep and abiding dualism: the mind they suppose is a matter of formal processes and is independent of quite specific material causes in the way that milk and sugar are not.