carbon vs silicon

When I fired up my IBM PC jr in 1982 I had to have the DOS disk inserted.  After it was sufficiently awake if I wanted to run my state-of-the-art Lotus 123 I had to take out the DOS disk and put in my Lotus 123 disk to create a spreadsheet, and if I wanted to save that spreadsheet I had to take out the Lotus 123 disk and put in my data disk and save it there.  Hard drives came out about 1986 and what an advance they were.  There were still floppies, the big 5 1/4 gave way to the hard plastic ones that were easier to carry around, and I think there was something even smaller just before the whole species went obsolete, now I think it is all thumb drives.  There was the CD which you could write data to and read from, but anymore it is for music, or in its more powerful form, the DVD, for music, but both those forms are fading now and I think streaming is the new thing.  My current computer is from the days just before Windows 10.  It's still performing well, but I dread its demise and having to walk into the Best Buy and look at all the new-fangled machines, and hear the clerk respond to my queries with a mumbled "Okay Boomer." 

What kind of CDs does Beagles listen to when he drives over the river and through the woods?


The big test for AI is the Turing test,  You start up a chat which might be with a human or a robot (I am using computer and robot interchangeably), and if after five minutes you can't tell if it's a robot or a human and it's a robot, then it has passed the Turing test.  So far no robot has.  They can whip us in chess and even in a language based thing like Jeopardy, but they can't touch the guy on the next barstool in mundane conversation.

Some of us, me included, would like to think that they never will.  We would like to think that there is something special about our reasoning and even more so, our music and our art.  When listening to music or looking at art, if we knew it was by a machine it would not be that interesting to us, we like to think we can perceive some kind of connection between the observer and the artist.  The thing about carbon vs silicon is not so much that the silicon can rise to the level of the carbon as it is that this takes the carbon down to the level of the silicon, the machine, are we nothing more than glorified toasters?