On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 5:25 PM, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:04 AM, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> > I don't really find the Turing Test that meaningful, to be honest. > > > I am certain that in your like you have met some people that you consider > brilliant and some that are as dumb as a sack full of doorknobs, if it's not > the Turing test how did you differentiate the geniuses from the imbeciles? > >> > I find it a much more worthwhile endeavour to create a machine that can >> > understand what we mean > > > And the only way you can tell if a machine (or another human being) > understands what you mean or not is by observing the subsequent behavior.
I completely agree. However, the Turing test is a very specific instance of a "subsequent behavior" test. It's one where a machine is asked to be undistinguishable from a human being when communicating through a text terminal. This will entail a lot of lying. (e.g: "what do you look like?"). It's a hard goal, and it will surely help AI progress, but it's not, in my opinion, an ideal goal. >> > like a human does, without the need to convince us that it has human >> > emotions > > > Some humans are VERY good at convincing other humans that they have certain > emotions when they really don't, like actors or con-men; evolution has > determined that skillful lying can be useful. Sure, it's useful. I'm actually of the opinion that hypocrisy is our most important intellectual skill. The ability to advertise certain norms and then not follow them helped build civilization. But a subtle problem with the Turing test is that it hides one of the hurdles (in my important, the most significant hurdle) with the progress in AI: defining precisely what the problem is. The Turing test is a toy test. Cheers Telmo. > > John K Clark > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
