Comment Re:It's not really a myth anymore (Score 1) 222
I think it's impossible to simulate intention. People mistake intention with mathematical knowledge. That's why the term "artificial intelligence" is so wrong and so limited. Consciousness and intention are much richer than mathematical intelligence. Consciousness and awareness require subtle skills that we humans use to interact with the real world; skills that are so subtle we barely notice ourselves using them. We certainly don't understand those skills. And since we don't understand them we can't build them into a computer program.
Writing software that interacts with the real world is very hard, because the world is too complicated and variable. Have you ever tried to write code that handles a user interface? It's very hard, because users are so varied in their assumptions about what your program is doing. Hell, you don't have to be a programmer to know that: we have all run into bad UIs. That's why the iPhone was such a big hit: its designers paid a huge amount of effort and time to make sure the UI worked well. Previous phones had UIs written by the phone's engineers as an afterthought. Those UIs sucked, and the iPhone ate their lunch.
Even though writing a UI is so hard, users have to learn how to use it. They have to get accustomed to its limitations. A general purpose UI that could interact with the untamed world is probably impossible to write. So much more impossible must it be to write a program that can interact with the real world and plan that world's destruction.