On 25 March 2015 at 06:23, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Mar 24, 2015 Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> >> 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. >>> >> >> > Yes, that is the important thing. That is not what the Turing Test >> asks, though. >> > > I believe the only reason he devised it to test for humanity rather than > intelligence is that he thought if people knew it was a machine most would > never admit it was intelligent regardless of what it did. And I think > Turing was correct about that. > > Agreed. I also think you have to consider the context, this was at a time when only a few electronic computers had ever been built, and the only thing most people knew about computers was from SF - e.g. "Metropolis", "The day the Earth stood still", Asimov's laws of robotics, "The City and the Stars", "Forbidden planet" and so on! So he was pitching the idea against a cultural background that, even for experts in the field, involved all this baggage - the idea that robots might turn on their creators and so on. And he was trying to put across the idea that it was a serious proposition that a machine could think - an idea that at the time would have seemed rather far out, along with rockets to the Moon, flying cars and death rays...
So he wasn't looking for some nuanced argument about whether a machine would in fact be intelligent, conscious, have a sense of self or emotions ... he wanted to get past all the anthropomorphism that had been attached to machines in popular fiction and come up with something that was a bare bones operational test. I wonder if he would have expected it to be reified, as it has apparently been - or might he have expected our viewpoint to have become more sophisticated by now? -- 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/d/optout.
