Avogadro Corp arose from a lunch conversation about a realistic way that an artificial intelligence might emerge. Almost everything in this book is possible with the technology available in 2011.
It’s possible that brilliant computer scientists will find some clever way to approximate human level intelligence in computers soon. However, even if we don’t, because of the exponential growth in computing power, in the next twenty years, computers will be powerful enough to directly simulate the human brain at the level of individual neurons. This is the so-called brute force approach to artificial intelligence. It will be trivial for every computer programmer out there to play around with creating artificial intelligences in their spare time. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a genie that won’t stay in its bottle for much longer.
For more information on what happens when computers become smarter than humans, read The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. For a fictional account, I recommend Accelerando by Charles Stross.
William Hertling