Bet 172
Duration 71 years (02004-02075)
PREDICTOR
Kevin Kelly
CHALLENGER
Unchallenged
The best silicon chip technology of 2005 is probably sufficient for creating an artificial intelligence if it were programmed and wired in the "correct" way. Or to say it in other words, what we in 2005 lack is not denser or faster chips, but better and more intelligent software. The difference between a monkey brain and a human brain is primarily how the gray matter is structured. That difference of organization is still a mystery to us, but once the mystery is solved, hackers and bright high school seniors working on a science fair could retro-wire a working AI using hundreds of old chips unearthed from landfills of our time, assuming a Turing Test AI had already been achieved by then (which I do). The strong version of this prediction says that the hackers will also manage to only use cooling or communication hardware from 2005, although it may be redesigned as needed.