Can Robots be Conscious?

Here's
an interesting article from the New York Times. The field of Artifical Intelligence started out with high hopes but has fallen short of its lofty goals so far. Computers still fail pathetically when faced with the Turing test (imitate a human without detection). With today's supercomputers it seems likely that we have more processing power than can be found in the brain of a very simple organism such as an Amoeba or tiny bug. However, we can't make computers do anything "intelligent" other than obey commands that we tell them to do. That's probably a good thing though, when you watch movies like "The Terminator".

-BT