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Everything you Want to Know About the Turing Test
An anonymous reader writes "Everything you want to know about
the Turing test provided by
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is their
latest entry."
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I've always hated the Turing test. It's too subjective, and has forced people into believing that sentience (what the lay-person thinks AI is) can be simulated. It forced AI junkies to think the road to AI was paved by the perfect grammar for English; a pipe dream to be sure.
AI is not being able to have a conversation with your computer, AI is just algorithms -- computing the right answer to complex problems as quickly as possible.
What most people think of as AI is really Artificial Sentience, and the more I learn about computer hardware the more I realize that it will not happen on my PC.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Inventing true computer intelligence (what is often referred to as strong AI), has often been compared to inventing a flying machines by many AI supporters. They claim there were just as many nay-sayers at the end of the 19th century regarding whether we could physically build a flying machine.
I don't remember who, but someone published a great article in Scientific American that claimed the Turing Test has mis-guided the goals of artificial intelligence. He said, instead of trying to build a bird, let's try and build an airplane. Building AI that was truly human-like would be as useless as building a flying machine that was truly bird-like.
You're assuming a premise, and we don't know that it's true. If computers can do what we do, then there's reason to believe that we may be able to build some that can do it better than us.
That said, we are nowhere close to building computers that do what we do. Our best models of cognition and language (which we believe to be central to our 'intelligence') fail miserably when we try to implement them on a large scale using computer systems. Even if it worked, there's no reason to believe it would be a "Terminator II" scenario. We can always quite literally pull the plug. It would be a miracle to create a computer with the intelligence of a mentally retarded child, so to entertain notions of a computer that suddenly becomes self aware and takes over everything (like Cartman's Trapper-Keeper) is rather fanciful.
The Turing test is not about "cognitive reasoning". Whether or not you "pass" depends on whether or not the "interrogator" (who reads the transcript of a human's conversation with the machine) can tell which participant is the machine. BTW, you find it "ammusing" to know that some humans have failed the Turing test, and some machines have passed it. It really says more about the interrogator and the test than the participants.
Remember back in school when you were asked to define something "in your own words?" The goal was to prevent you from just parroting the definition you got from the book. But most students eventually learn they can change the word order and substitute a few synonyms and still get away with it. The statement you quoted means that doing that doesn't count, since "the dullest of men can do" it: it requires only a basic knowledge of grammar.
We have, in our little calcite skulls, an incredibly advanced technology. So advanced that, for the first 99% of our existence as conscious beings, we simply took it for granted. Then we got thinking about how we think, and the only thing we were equipped to answer with was to say "it's magic." So we posited the idea of a "soul": this nebulous, weightless, insubstantial magic thing that made us who we are, and would live on after the death of our physical bodies.
Slowly, neuroscience has chipped away at the logical need for this magic, even as our desire for its emotional comfort held steady.
I believe our brains are machines. There are perfectly adequate explanations for our thoughts and memories which incorporate absolutely no supernatural mechanisms. Further, positing a supernatural entity which controls our thoughts adds absolutely nothing by way of explanation (any more than simply saying "humans run on magic") while opening up all sorts of uncomfortable logical quandaries: Why would our souls cause us to behave differently when the brain is loaded up with ethanol? Why can people drastically change their personalities after head trauma, strokes, or other brain-related diseases. If a soul can survive physical dissolution of the brain with memories and emotions intact, why isn't it equally unchanging in the face of Zoloft?
Your analysis of the Turing test is quite simply wrong. It's possible--in fact, rather easy--to mimic a passive psychoanalyst as Eliza does. It's even easier to imitate a paranoid schitzophrenic, and easier still to imitate a 12-year old AOL'er. Imitating a normal cocktail conversation would be somewhat more difficult, but still doable. But put a computer up against an intelligent human in a real discussion of ideas, and anything less than true AI is sharkbait.
Part of the problem is, you seem to misunderstand what the Turing test is supposed to be doing. The test, in its most general form, can be used to discriminate between any two sorts of intelligences. A man and a woman imitating a man. A nuclear scientist and someone pretending to be a nuclear scientist. A paranoid schitzophrenic and a computer pretending to be a paranoid schitzophrenic.
If I were to build a machine that imitated your friend Buddy, the Turing test would be to put you in front of two screens, one with the real Buddy and the other hooked up to my machine. If you were only able to guess which was Buddy half the time, my machine would not only have passed the broader Turing test (which only says that the respondent is intelligent), but you would also have to admit that the machine was substantially similar to Buddy's mind.
Your snippet of conversation is proof of your misunderstanding. Any computer can fool a sufficiently oblivious person into thinking they're having a conversation. Where the tread hits the tarmac is when an intelligent person, looking for signs of non-intelligence and fails to find it. A real Turing conversation would go something like:
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!