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Human vs Computer Intelligence
DrLudicrous writes "The NYTimes is running an article regarding tests devised to differentiate from human and computer intelligence. One example are captchas, which can consists of a picture of words, angled and superimposed. A human will be able to read past the superposition, while a computer will not, and thus fails the test. It also goes a bit into some of Turing's predictions of what computers would be like by the year 2000."
We are never going to have a machine that is truly "human". Let me explain.
That doesn't mean we won't have intelligent machines that can do just about anything intellectually that a human can do. A human being is more than just a smart computer. Our behavior is governed not only by the higher logic of our brain, but also by millions of years of bizarre -- often obsolete -- instincts. If you yanked a brain out of a body and hooked it to a computer, it would no longer be truly human because of the lack of hormonal responses that come from every part of the body.
It's simply going to be too hard/impractical and, frankly, useless to make an intelligent machine that mimicked every hormonal reaction and instinctual mechanism.
We will have intelligent machines, but we will never have human machines.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Once you devise a test system, someone can write non-AI software that can fake it and pretend to be human by knowing what it needs to for the test. Only a real human can tell human and machine intelligence apart, not a systematic test. That's why Bladerunners had to manually test the androids, instead of just letting a machine do it. Real-time human insight is key to testing machine intelligence.
11*43+456^2
Did anyone notice that a lot of these "human" test are also the same ones used for things like hearing/eye tests, color-vision impairment, etc.
This knocks out computers, which lack the intelligence/programming (so far) to differentiate between conflicting objects to make out a letter/numbers.
It also may knock out humans with vision problems though, especially those with colour-vision issues.For those with hearing problems, the sound test isn't good either.
It seems that right now, computers trying to translate these puzzles probably perform along par with old-folks. This also might mean that quite a few seniors may have issues getting a yahoo account though.
I don't believe that Turing proposed the Turing Test as the test to use, but rather as a "mathematical proof" that you could construct such a test.
Basically he said if you could not tell the difference between a computer and a person then you would have to say it was intellignet. ie. this is a way of establishing an upper-bound test - not necessarily that this is the best test.
Unfortunately, IMHO, the AI community and other latched onto this test and put effort into fulfilling the Tring Test rather than more practical and useful goals.
If you asked "Did you sleep well last night?" and the computer said "Me not sleep, me computer." (or some question on some other biological function) then you could probably determine the difference between a human and a computer. This need not, however, preclude machine intelligence.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If that's true, then it really doesn't make sense to attribute Nietzche's conclusions to Nietzche, since they were also deterministic. The Universe figured it out, and Nietzche just manifested a phenomenon.
The counter-argument is that formal systems (such as modern computers) have logical limitations that are not evident in human cognition. Therefore, machines must either make the same leap in complexity such that their actual thought processes can no longer be mapped directly to the underlying formal system, or else remain forever inferior to natural intelligences.
It's also interesting to wonder if Nietzche knew about (or even could have known about) the discovery that nothing is deterministic at the subatomic level. Would he have persisted in his belief that intelligence was deterministic, or would he have theorized that it was probabilistic?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
the question of whether computers use intelligence the same way as humans use intelligence has long been determined through the 'chineese room'.
the point of John Searle's Chinese Room being is to see if 'understanding' is involved in the process of computation. if you can 'process' the symbols of the cards without understanding them (since you're using a wordbook and a programme to do it) - by putting yourself in the place of the computer, you yourself can ask yourself if you required understanding to do it:
Minds Brains and Programmes (The Original Chineese Room):
http://www.bbsonline.org/documents/a/00/00/04/8
the complementary question - 'is the human brain
a digital computer' is answered by the same author:
Is the Human Brain a Digital Computer (John Searle):
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Papers/Py104
Summary of the Argument:
1. On the standard textbook definition, computation is defined syntactically in terms of symbol manipulation.
2. But syntax and symbols are not defined in terms of physics. Though symbol tokens are always physical tokens, "symbol" and "same symbol" are not defined in terms of physical features. Syntax, in short, is not intrinsic to physics.
3. This has the consequence that computation is not discovered in the physics, it is assigned to it. Certain physical phenomena are assigned or used or programmed or interpreted syntactically. Syntax and symbols are observer relative.
4. It follows that you could not discover that the brain or anything else was intrinsically a digital computer, although you could assign a computational interpretation to it as you could to anything else. The point is not that the claim "The brain is a digital computer" is false. Rather it does not get up to the level of falsehood. It does not have a clear sense. You will have misunderstood my account if you think that I am arguing that it is simply false that the brain is a digital computer. The question "Is the brain a digital computer?" is as ill defined as the questions "Is it an abacus?", "Is it a book?", or "Is it a set of symbols?", "Is it a set of mathematical formulae?"
5. Some physical systems facilitate the computational use much better than others. That is why we build, program, and use them. In such cases we are the homunculus in the system interpreting the physics in both syntactical and semantic terms.
6. But the causal explanations we then give do not cite causal properties different from the physics of the implementation and the intentionality of the homunculus.
7. The standard, though tacit, way out of this is to commit the homunculus fallacy. The humunculus fallacy is endemic to computational models of cognition and cannot be removed by the standard recursive decomposition arguments. They are addressed to a different question.
8. We cannot avoid the foregoing results by supposing that the brain is doing "information processing". The brain, as far as its intrinsic operations are concerned, does no information processing. It is a specific biological organ and its specific neurobiological processes cause specific forms of intentionality. In the brain, intrinsically, there are neurobiological processes and sometimes they cause consciousness. But that is the end of the story.
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best regards,
john