I was asked a question the other day, and it suddenly came back to me: "Don't you think that one day computers will be in every way on par with humans?" My qualified and uninformed opinion is "no".

It seems to me that computer engineers will constantly make faster hardware, computer scientists will ever create and optimize their software algorithms, and people in some field that may or may not already exist will come up with better ways for computers to organize and store information. This can already be seen as computers are already getting better at what used to be tasks reserved for humans, such as optical and speech recognition. The question posed to me, however, was in the context of such things as learning and the creative processing of and reaction to incoming information.

My answer at the time was that computers may eventually appear to be on par with humans. This may be possible through myriad algorithms for specific tasks, and through computers' eventual ability to brute-force the processing of information.

I think that humans will one day create a computer that has the appearance of equality with a human mind, but I don't know if we can create a computer that is truly equal with the mind of man.