On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:
> In my opinion the fundamental problem with the Turing Test is that > passing it is an act of deception. The computer has to fake being a human. > Lying takes intelligence, some have even suggested that the ability to deceive our fellows was of the driving evolutionary forces that drove the increase in brain size, but if you have scruples about it then how about this; you are free to ask any question except "are you a machine?" that way it can always tell the truth. And anyway the really important thing isn't if you can detect if the thing you're talking to is a human but if you can detect if the thing you're talking to is intelligent. > > the computer has no human body, > That's just cosmetic. As far back as the 1964 world's fair Disney made a pretty convincing animated manikin of Abraham Lincoln, but I don't find that very interesting. I've never met you so I don't know what you look like and don't much care, but if I found out you didn't look like anything at all because you were a computer program I would find that very interesting indeed. > Human behavior is full of patterns, that can be exploited by brute force. > This is what Watson does, essentially. Watson is more or less a traditional > database of character strings with sophisticated indexing and querying > algorithms. > I confess that I don't have much patience when people say yes the machine behaved very intelligently, more intelligently than I did, but it doesn't count as being *really* intelligent because the machine was only successful in solving that very difficult problem because it did it its way rather than my inferior way that didn't work. > > Watson appears to be an amazing piece of software and I think it > displays intelligence, but in a much narrower fashion than the hype > surrounding it seem to assume. > Deep Blue was the world chess champion but it's intelligence was very narrow, however on Jeopardy Watson's demonstration that he understood the questions, never mind that he knew the answers, showed that his intelligence was much broader. > I propose a different test. I show you a computer program that you can > have a conversation with. You talk with it for half an hour and then I tell > you I'm going to shut it down forever. It will essentially die. How > distressed are you? What if I point a gun at a bonobo monkey? > That would just test for what somebody thought was cute not what they thought was intelligent. People are suckers for anything with juvenile characteristics like a big head, small jaw, receding chin, bulging cranium and pudgy legs. Knock together a robot that has all that and it would be cute as a button even if it was dumb as dog shit. 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
