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Teslas Have Minds, Says Elon Musk

Car czar Elon Musk has claimed that a Tesla car has a mind. Not an enormous mind, mind you...

Science fiction is replete with computers that offer some degree of intelligence (see this Dictionary of Artificial Intelligence Terms in Science Fiction ), but the explicit idea that a computer system can mimic a human mind is a bit more unusual.

In his 1955 story The Tunnel Under the World, Frederik Pohl describes an Electronic Analogue of Living Brain:

...The machines were controlled by computers that were really not computers at all, but the electronic analogues of living brains. And if they were turned off, were they not dead? For each had once been a human mind.

Take a master petroleum chemist, infinitely skilled in the separation of crude oil into its fractions. Strap him down, probe into his brain with searching electronic needles. The machine scans the patterns of the mind, translates what it sees into charts and sine waves. Impress these same waves on a robot computer and you have your chemist. Or a thousand copies of your chemist, if you wish, with all of his knowledge and skill, and no human limitations at all.

Put a dozen copies of him into a plant and they will run it all, twenty-four hours a day, seven days of every week, never tiring, never overlooking anything, never forgetting....

Professional race car drivers and cabbies, watch your backs!

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