A raging debate within Artificial Intelligence. Some researchers feel that the objective of AI is to build sentient beings of similar intelligence to humans; and the really really strong AI people believe that this must be done by mirroring the brain's function on computers. This is the strong AI position.

The weak AI position holds that AI should try to develop technologies which have facets of intelligence, but the objective is not necessarily to build a completely sentient entity. For example, weak AI researchers see their contribution as things like expert systems used for medical diagnosis, speech recognition and data mining. These use "intelligent" models, but they do not help create a sentient entity


Thanks to m_turner for the inspiration.