1/10/19 - Research day 3

Today in class we continued research for our senior paper. Mr. Rivers was absent today so Mr. Hall was our substitute. I personally researched more into the ethics of creating artificial general intelligence capable of feeling emotion. Would an AI truly be a living thing, experiencing emotion, or would it simply be mimicking human emotions?
The current definition of life is "the condition that distinguishes animals and plants from inorganic matter, including the capacity for growth, reproduction, functional activity, and continual change preceding death", would this mean that an AI would have to eventually terminate, or die in order to be considered life? And can the AI truly be considered life if it's made out of silicon and precious metals? These are questions I hope to answer with research.

However, I may have to slightly alter the specifics of my research. I have not had the easiest time finding information about these questions because they have an element of philosophy and artificial general intelligence is not projected to happen within the next decade, making it hard to find legitimate answers backed by evidence. 

However, my research was not all wasted. I learned a lot about AI and computing in general through my research. One thing I learned is that computing has not kept up with Moore's law in the past few years. This is due to the fact that the transistors on chips are getting so small that they are running into issues with quantum mechanics. Intel even addressed this in a press conference saying that they were going to focus more on processor efficiency than raw power. This is one of the advantages of quantum computers. Quantum computers use the laws of quantum mechanics to their advantage instead of trying to work around them.