...but we also posses something intrinsic that can't be measured or defined and certainly not replicated by a computer. We just have a "sense" of the actions or actions to come in our surrounding and an instinctual ability to pre-react to unforeseen, unknowable or unpredictable situations and all without forethought. It is more of a vestige of our animal survival heritage.
To me this is an area that AI will NEVER be able to imitate and another reason that all this sentient talk is BS.
Actually.. you got to be pretty careful on these blanket statements.
With humans we have an.. interesting relationship with Time and Predictions. If you think about it for more than a bit, with a long reaction time, how in the heck can a baseball batter hit a ball, or how can someone
catch a ball; or, for that matter, ride a bicycle where at any moment the bike may hit an obstruction and we have to react quickly?
Thing is, humans are sort of running an analog computer that predicts where where we're going and, before we get there, sends motor neuron impulses
before the critical time so that the propagation times of the brain, neurons to the muscles, and muscle propagation times all line up so we catch the ball, hit the ball, recover from a trip, and all that jazz. Our wetware is
slow compared to computers, but it runs algorithms that aren't so much real-time as pre-time.
There's no particular reason that computers can't be made to do the same kind of thing; in fact, they are.
Speaking as a working engineer who dabbled on and off with control theory, I will say that it's
easier to put a speedy computer on top of a fast sensor with a fast reacting actuator (or the equivalent), since the math comes out easier.
I happen to be married to a Human Factors engineer; a good part of her training in design is taking account of what I'll call, for lack of a better term, is "Wetware in the Loop". With the additional delays, design of hardware can get
interesting; it's possible to build uncontrollable-by-humans vehicles that look like they ought to work, but won't, since the overall system (with people) has to take into account delays, reaction times, and all that jazz.
Finally.. It's rare that humans run into novel problems all
that often. In general, when faced with a spanking new problem, it takes a human significant time to figure out what to do. And we're not talking 0.5 seconds, here - more like minutes, or longer, sometimes. The whole point of road regulations, build requirements, standard signs, and all that jazz is to
limit the number of potential choices that a driver has to run into. And then licensing and driver's ed to train people up with what one runs into out there so they
don't have to think about it - just react on pre-loaded memories.