"St Lawrence of Google"

mcho writes "The Economist has a story about Google's co-founder, Larry Page, who " always wanted to change the world". The article attempts to make an arguement about the company's true intentions, amid all the rumors about potential Google products. "Google is already working on a massive and global computing grid. Eventually, says Mr Saffo, 'they're trying to build the machine that will pass the Turing test' -- in other words, an artificial intelligence that can pass as a human in written conversations. Wisely or not, Google wants to be a new sort of deus ex machina.""

Comments

Re:Deus ex machina from Sergey and Larry

[Rob_Ogilvie]

Please read up on what, exactly, deus ex machina is. It is a literary term, describing the way gods would be lowered on to stage with a mechane (machine) to solve otherwise unsolvable problems that came up during the play. Because the "gods" would come from the "machine," the term "deus ex machina" was used - meaning, literally, god from the machine.

People using the term to describe Google sound like people who overheard the term once, had no idea what it meant, so they translated it and decided to take a literal meaning to the thing. I'm reminded of people using the term "body of crime" incorrectly (once even on CSI... *sigh*).

Re:Turing Test is dumb

[abes]

The Turing test is more than holding up a conversation. It is causing difficulty for the testor to decide if room A has the human or room B. It is easy to imagine if the testor is unimaginitive, how this test might seem dull. Questions like: Do you like the Red Sox, how big is the earth, or where is the nearest Starbucks, can all easily be answered by a computer. These rely on standard data mining techniques.

Suppose, on the other hand, the testor asks questions such as: "What's the meaning of Life?", "Please compare Emily Dickenson to Thoreau", or "What do you dream about?". While specific responses might be able to used, provided the programmer has guessed in advanced what might be asked, to actually have a *conversation* about these, is not likely to happen any time soon with a computer near you.

More importantly, to answer your question, being able to converse about these questions, I will submit, *requires* a thinking entity. Why? Because it's dependent on creation of new material -- somehow taking your old data, and coming to new conclusions.

Re:Deus ex machina?

[Vreejack]

Don't know why the parent was modded down. Perhaps the moderator was as clueless as the author. Pedantic tirade, anyone?

For those who do not understand the term Deus ex machina---and are therefore smart enough not to use it in public---a good example of the term would be the eagles from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. They were invoked to resolve a plot problem and seem to require a bit too much suspension of disbelief, since a reader is left wondering why the heck they didn't just use the eagles to fly to Mordor instead of engaging on that perilous quest. Also, see any of the works by Stephen King.

The Greek tragedian Euripides was infamous for resolving difficulties in his plays by lowering a god from a crane (the machina, in Latin) who would then resolve all the outstanding issues.

For the pedants who think the literal meaning might be good to describe artificial intelligence, think again. The term in Latin is a calque, which is a literal translation from the Greek, not perhaps a phrase the Romans would have coined.