Live data from Hacker News

Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

kurzweilai.net

131–140 of 164 posts

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#131
post #31

I think most people misunderstand the intent of Turing's paper in which he describes his eponymous test. I agree with Chomsky's reading, which he laid out in "Language & Thought": "There is a great deal of often heated debate about these matters in the literature of the cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and philosophy of mind, but it is hard to see that any serious question has been posed. The question of…

>Fooling people into mistaking a submarine for a whale doesn't show that submarines really swim Why not? Presumably part of the act of fooling would involve 'swimming' submarines. I think passing a __strong__ Turing test actually does say something about our brains, cognition, and consciousness. And by a 'strong Turing test', I don't mean dinky 5 minute tests with a "Ukrainian boy". Imagine you carry on a 20 year rel…

>If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and you can't tell the difference between it and a duck, it's a duck. //

Just because you can't tell that something is false, or perhaps just can't elucidate the reason, doesn't make it true.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#132
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe we're operating with different notions of "the question of consciousness", but I have to disagree that a perfect simulation of a human mind would dissolve the problem. Because human brains are magic? > And by "the problem" I mean the Hard Problem of Consciousness, the issue of how the hell the subjective experience of being arises in a lump of bloody meat (or in anything, really). You have your answer, the eff…

> Because human brains are magic? See, this is the problem with this virulent strain of Scientism making the rounds right now. There's this tendency to divide ideas into two camps: "explained by our current understanding of physics" and "magic". It seems like a knee-jerk reaction to religion, like anyone that posits that we don't have a complete understanding of reality is therefore a crypto-theist. It completely mis…

Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would result in something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no.

If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). If no, then, again, you're contradicting the assumption in the question. You think consciousness is not determined by behavior. Ok, then what determines whether or not something is conscious?

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#133
post #86

The answers Ray got back are borderline embarrassing. They're designed to deflect the question by ignoring the request and asking another unrelated question or deflecting by humor. These are common ploys in faking AI chat. Hell, what 13 yo calls himself a "little boy?" I was in 8th grade at 13 and looking forward to high school. I can't imagine calling myself a "little boy" at an age when some of my peers were sexual…

Clearly if the criteria for passing the Turing test rests on this 30% of judges "fooled" threshold, we need to add a screen for the judges themselves...

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/09/turing-test-e... is by one of the judges, Robert Llewellyn is a TV presenter (eg scrapheap challenge) and was an actor (eg Red Dwarf, a comic sci-fi series). He apparently was a judge.

He mentions a Professor Martin Smith in the article as a judge too. http://www.mdx.ac.uk/aboutus/staffdirectory/martin-smith.asp... [which page I've just noticed mentions scrapheap challenge].

.. and following that line I note that Professor Kevin Warwick appears to have history with both Llewellyn (promoting Warwick's book in 2002 here, http://www.reddwarf.co.uk/news/2002/11/08/roberts-robots/) and Smith .. which might make this a case of him having gathered a few cronies together to generate some publicity?

Is there a record of the event somewhere that could disavow me of the result simply being a case of partial judges being generous towards a friend?

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#134
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because human brains are magic? See, this is the problem with this virulent strain of Scientism making the rounds right now. There's this tendency to divide ideas into two camps: "explained by our current understanding of physics" and "magic". It seems like a knee-jerk reaction to religion, like anyone that posits that we don't have a complete understanding of reality is therefore a crypto-theist. It completely mis…

Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would result in something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no. If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). If no, then, again, you're contradicting the assumption in the question. You thi…

> Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would be able to create something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no.

Sure, I'll admit the possibility exists.

> If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption given in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties).

I must've missed this... who was saying that identical behavior implies identical properties? Sure, I'd probably disagree that the A.I. is conscious in a subjective sense, and I'd also probably disagree that identical behavior implies identical properties. People can imitate each other without taking on the properties of the imitated.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#135
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would result in something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no. If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). If no, then, again, you're contradicting the assumption in the question. You thi…

> Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would be able to create something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no. Sure, I'll admit the possibility exists. > If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption given in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). I must've missed this…

[deleted]

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#136
the Turing test is to fool into "believing it is a person". In this case the judges were fooled into "believing it is an Ukranian 13 years boy" (with development disability probably). I think "a person" in the test means at least average IQ and average education/knowledge volume.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few problems with this line of reasoning. First, that there is an implicit assumption about how cognition and consciousness are defined, but there is no real definition. Following the example, it's not defined what a duck is, and "philosophers" actually don't try to elevate the question - they try to find answers to it. While a "strong" test for example would look appealing, the problem is that there is n…

>First, that there is an implicit assumption about how cognition and consciousness are defined, but there is no real definition. And yet volumes are written on the topic, and you have no trouble dismissing this particular approach as not really answering "consciousness". Well what do you mean exactly then? >and while a human would pass all the possible models of humanity, a computer would surely pass only the ones it…

In any case, neither of you have fooled me yet.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#138
post #135
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you believe a perfect simulation of a human mind would be able to create something with an identical behavior to that of the person whose mind we're simulating? yes or no. Sure, I'll admit the possibility exists. > If yes, do you disagree that both are conscious? If you do, then you're contradicting the assumption given in the question (that identical behavior implies identical properties). I must've missed this…

[deleted]

> What determines whether something is conscious?

I don't really have an empirical "test" for subjective consciousness beyond my own immediate, first-person experience of it. This may sound like a concession or even a defeat, but I think I'm allowed to posit that phenomena exist which we currently lack the empirical tools to investigate. "Currently" is the key word; as I said before, it is arrogant to assume consciousness will forever remain a mystery to scientific inquiry, just as it is arrogant to assume it must be a simple extension of existing theories.

I admit I have nothing beyond my own experience to validate the idea of subjective perception, and I have no evidence beyond intuition as to whether or not a machine can "experience" input the same way a brain can. However, I think I'm still entitled to believe that subjective experience is a real phenomena whose nature can and should be explained, and that our scientific understanding is presently inadequate for this task.

EDIT: I can understand the fear of relying on intuition. After all, it's the same thing that led us to believe that lightning came from the gods. But that doesn't mean that we should throw out the entire experience of perceiving lightning. Clearly lightning is a phenomena we experience, but we still don't understand how photons entering our eyes produce the subjective experience of blinding whiteness, or how vibrations from thunder translated into electrical signals by the ear result in the subjective experience of the sound itself. The information is in the brain, but we still don't know how information becomes experience. This doesn't mean we have to explain it via gods, but it does mean we still have something left to explain.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#139
It's quite interesting to read Turing's original article (A. M. Turing (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind). I don't think he would have been that impressed by Prof Warwick's claims.

http://www.csee.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf

In fact if you read it, the whole claim that you can call more than 30% of the judges getting a test wrong one time 'passing the Turing test' is rather contrary to what Turing actually was saying.

Re: Response by Ray Kurzweil to chatbot Eugene Goostman “passing the Turing test”

#140
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we associate with thinking is some biological/spiritual aspect Well I don't. > The fact that we have different words for "think", "compute", and "calculate" Also my native language (Finnish) doesn't have separate words for "compute" and calculate". Both are covered by "laskea". (Also "suorittaa" is used, but that is "execute".)

So the words for a calculator (small electronic device used to do mathematics, usually arithmetic) and the word for computer (like a general purpose desktop computer, the thing that runs and OS like Apple OS X or Microsoft Windows 8) are the same? I'm assuming that you do have a different word for think though as you didn't mention that. What about arvioida ? Would that be used for compute? This might be an instances…

> So the words for a calculator ... and the word for computer ... are the same?

No no. We have laskin ("calculator") for calculator and tietokone ("data machine") for computer.

If you don't know any other language than English, you'll be surprised about how many different ways different languages have come up with for words for modern things, like the computer. The etymology does not necessarily resemble that of the English language.

> arvioida

That is "to estimate".

Post reply on HN