PhilosophyOfArtificialIntelligence

Quora Answer : Has anyone created a way to represent a thought on a computer?

Dec 27

Humanity invented written text to represent its thoughts. That's what books are about.

And computers have been holding and manipulating text since before ASCII.

So in that sense, we represent thoughts on computers all the time.

Neural networks are an experimental model of holding and manipulating knowledge in a form that's inspired by our understanding of how the brain works.

Today we are finding neural networks increasingly practical. And using them more and more. But the cost of that is that these neural networks are not highly detailed models of exactly what goes on the brain. They are abstractions borrowing a few of the basic ideas.

We do not, so far, have an accurate way to read a thought from a brain electronically, copy it into a computer or copy it directly back into a brain at the current time.

I suspect we might get closer to this than most people imagine within the next 50 years. I think mind-reading computers are going to be with us disturbingly soon. And we'll be freaked out when we see them.

But there's nothing like this yet.