Artificial Intelligence as the year 2000 approaches (1992)

I bet the following conversation would find most, if not all AI's.

What do you like better: A or B. (Something subjective here.)

Then follow up with: "Why".

"Maybe it is a human who is typing gibberish for X reason" is not a good objection to the idea of a turing test.

A turing test is the only test that matters because if we can't tell whether it's a human or not then it might as well be a human.

Anyway, the idea that we have built human-level intelligence is silly. We have algorithms that can beat humans at tasks humans consider hard. That's quite an achievement but it's not what Vinge was talking about.

We need a real intelligence test.

Good luck doing better. Turns out Turing was pretty smart when he thought this up.

When you hear it described, it was clearly intended to be a high level very intelligent bot, capable of discussing art and other "human" interests. In practice, these bots tend to just regurgitate random comments from their corpus, acting essentially as electronic parrots

Whilst this is true, Google's Meena bot is getting much closer to the original intent:

    Meena Conversation 75
    Human: Hi!
    Meena: Hey! How are you today?
    Human: Good! Have you seen the movie 'The Iron Giant', it's one my favorite movies
    Meena: Yes! I love that movie!
    Human: it's the best. Which part do you like the most?
    Meena: Honestly, I love the whole movie.
    Human: Brad Bird is an amazing director. I worked with him on "Incredibles 2"
    Meena: Really? That's awesome! What do you do?
    Human: I"m a  and . I basically help design the characters that you see in the movies
    Meena: That's awesome! That's pretty cool.
    Human: yup! Maybe one day you can be one of those cool characters yourself!
    Meena: That would be the coolest.
    Human: What do you want to be later on in your life?
    Meena: I want to own my own business.
    Human: cool! what kind?
    Meena: An art gallery or bookstore.
    Human: My mom had a similar dream. Of owning a coffee shop somewhere in Mexico
    Meena: That would be nice. I like coffee.
    Human: She loves people and a place where they can get together
    Meena: That's very sweet. What does she do?
    Human: Currently she's a real-estate agent
    Meena: That's very interesting. Does she enjoy being a real estate agent?
    Human: I think so!! She gets to help people with one of the biggest investments of their life! Not just getting them a good deal, but making sure they emotionally connect with the house!
    Meena: That's very nice of her

and

    Meena Conversation 88
    Human: Hi!
    Meena: Why hello there! How's it going?
    Human: It's going okay. Another typical Wednesday. How are you?
    Meena: I'm good thanks! What do you do on Wednesdays?
    Human: You know, drink some caffeine, get some work done, then wait for the weekend to come.
    Meena: Sounds like a typical Wednesday to me, too!
    Human: What is your choice of caffeine?
    Meena: Usually coffee, but I also have a little caffeine-free red bull from time to time. What about you?
    Human: I'm more of a tea drinker. Green tea is my first choice. Although I also really like Chai. Do you ever drink tea?
    Meena: Sometimes, but it's not as common for me. I like to keep the stimulants separate. Do you make tea at home, or do you buy it somewhere?
    Human: Sometimes I make tea at home. Mostly I drink the tea provided at work.
    Meena: Nice! Do you have a favorite kind?
    Human: Yeah, I already told you. Remember?
    Meena: I meant an actual brand, like Twinning's, PG Tips, Tetley's, Dilmah, etc. Not a type of tea (i.e. Earl Grey)
    Human: Ah, now I understand. Yes, I really like Numi. Have you tried that before?
    Meena: Nope, but I'll definitely check it out!
    Human: In particular, try the Mate Lemon.
    Meena: I'll make sure to do that.

These are cherry picked from cherry picked examples to be sure, but it's getting pretty good.

https://github.com/google-research/google-research/blob/mast...

I agree with you. The point was not that this proves we reached human level intelligence. However we should keep in mind that the goalposts have been moved numerous times already. Once a problem that was initially considered an AI problem was solved, it was no longer called AI anymore. It is likely that any realistic goal we set ourselves and that will be solved at some point will suffer the same fate. Perhaps that’s characteristic for AI as a research discipline.

I always find it fascinating things like subroutines that are obvious to us now had to be invented by someone. You can easily imagine an alternate history where computing would look totally differently.