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People think computers will be able to understand what we understand without experiencing what we experience. I think that's a mistake. A computer without hands will never see what we see when we watch baseball. A computer without facial muscles will never see what we see when we see a person cry.

No creature could ever hold a conversation with a human about being a human without experiencing actual human life. The pooping and the drunkenness and the boredom and the hand holding and the uncomfortable shoes, and the slipping on ice--all of it. No amount of reading or looking at photos will create an understanding equivalent to the one we get from continuous interaction through a human body embedded the actual world.

Now, you could give a robot all of those experiences, but that AI would run into exactly the same intelligence challenges that a healthy aging human runs into. Not the memory loss and all that, but the ideas start to solidify. Certain things start to see unquestionable. Strange ideas seem like a waste of time. Some of aging isn't decrepitude, it's just side effects of the pile of data getting bigger.

Sure, being able to extrapolate more moves into the future (a la Deep Blue) will lessen some of that. But not all.

AI fantasists act like the limits of human intelligence are all human limits. But some of them are just the limits of intelligence.

I believe the cyborg reality will last a very, very long time. Biological intelligence will not be killed off until the great slow turning off of lights that the second law promised us. And at that point the robots won't be spared either.