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

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that in the hands of a sufficiently skilled photographer, that Leica does produce a better picture. The quality of the sensor is objectively better.

> The quality of the sensor is objectively better. Actually it's not. For one, Leica doesn't make their own sensors. Second, they have a very hard time with their processor software (in camera). The first model they put out a few years ago had awful color rendition and strange casts. And not that great performance in low light either. And I mean compared to the models of the era then. At least, IIRC, they smartly rem…

I know Leica doesn't make their own sensor. The company I work for made it (for the M). It is a pretty damn good sensor. Don't know enough about photography to judge the rest :-)

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

#152

The whole thing sounded iffy to me from the first second I heard about it, despite the fact that most of the tech media was going ga-ga over it. I mean, the AI being only a teenage Hungarian boy (meaning the judges should've expected it to be "less intelligent than a normal native adult")...and only fooling 1/3 of the judges? That sounds like a whole lot of cheating to declare that it "passed" the Turing test.

Pretty much any question that requires actual natural language understanding would presumably instantly reveal a bot today, like 'Is white darker than black?'.

It's not that simple. NLP has gotten good enough that there actually are systems which can answer questions like that. IBM's Watson can quickly sort through a massive number of documents for an answer. There are projects that have built massive databases of common sense knowledge like Cyc, which could possibly answer that question. And then large databases of human responses like cleverbot which probably already has been asked that at least once and can find it in it's database.

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

#153
post #97
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure that just because you can fool me that an object is a duck, that it is a duck. At least when applied to general AI. Nor do I necessarily agree that just because I can have a conversation with an algorithm, that we should give that algorithm all the rights given to humans. For example, if I say mean things to that algorithm, even one that can fool me into thinking it's another human for decades, is tha…

is it morally wrong for me to create a program consisting only of a singular red button, that when pushed, sets the sad flag? We could discover tomorrow that there's a "sad ganglia" in the human brain that can be set on or off with an electromagnetic field. Does that mean that humans are ultimately biological machines without rights?

Perhaps, but "feelings" are more complicated than that. Pain isn't just a little flag that gets set to TRUE. At the very least, it's rewiring your neurons to avoid that experience, initiating instincts, and affecting your entire brain.

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

#154
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…

Very insightful generalization. Where do you came from, by the way? Could you tell me about the place where you live?

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

#155
post #3

This is a nicely written and clear explanation of why the announcement by the University of Reading is bullshit. In fact, it is was more than they deserve. Way more. I would suggest shunning them is the right response. The University of Reading is, of course, the august institution behind: http://blog.jgc.org/2010/05/inside-rfid-virus.html http://blog.jgc.org/2006/12/midas-number-or-why-divide-by-ze...

So we reached consensus. Go on then! I know you are supposed to trick me.

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

#156
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Turing never even mentioned the criteria that participants should be aware that they are possibly talking to a computer. What? Here's what he said. It seems pretty clear that this version of the game involves one human interrogator, one human and one computer, and the interrogator has to decide which is human and which isn't. > The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imita…

The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper. From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpretation…

> The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper.

> From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpretation, but it isn't written down, leading to this ambiguity.

This is Turing's own description of the test. It is clear that the intention is for the human interegator to know tha they are talking to one human and one computer, and that they need to identify the computer. Any other interpretation of this description of the test is bizarre.

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

#157
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for your informative response.

Actually, I think that just knowing English well one can see the same effect as knowing a few other languages - the etymologies of words being dispersed amongst Latin, Greek, Scandinavian, Germanic and French origins (as a first pass, of course there's influence from many, many languages) makes it easy to see how many words can develop for the same thing, each having a subtle twist of meaning. Like the use in English of beef/cow for cooked meat vs. the animal.

The only words I know for a computer are computer (English derived from a name for a person who calculates values), ordinateur (French, origin is Latin to do with organising/ordering; close to English "ordinator"), cyfrifadur (sp? Welsh, origin is account-er; similar derivation as English), and rechner (German, a cognate with English "reckoner") ... but in these cases I think everyone normally uses just "computer" or a transliteration of it like in Kswahili ("kompyuta", don't quote me on that spelling!).

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

#158
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper. From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpretation…

> The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper. > From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpreta…

The quotes you gave were certainly relevant, but still: Turing doesn't state in his paper that the interrogator is to be made aware (all I said). The rest is our modern interpretation of the test. It's a fine interpretation that I don't have a problem with, but it is an interpretation, not a criteria lifted from the paper.

In the article Kurzweil even says as much: Turing was carefully imprecise in setting the rules for his test, and significant literature has been devoted to the subtleties of establishing the exact procedures for determining how to assess when the Turing test has been passed.

It is not made clear in the paper that the intention is for the human interrogator to be made aware of possible replacement. I myself know this is not the most popular interpretation, but it still makes sense as a Test, you just check if player C is wrong as often as before. Some research has shown that unaware people change their attitude and questions, while other research has shown that for some judges this doesn't matter. Early Turing bots were tested under the interpretation that judges can be unaware. For sourcing on this see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#Should_the_interrog...

I think one of the problems with the Test is that it was written by a mathematician and logician, while it touches on fundamental philosophical problems of consciousness and other minds. It may be valid in these pure domains of information theory, while it may be problematic in philosophy of mind. It is not sure where one ends and the other begins. Philosophers hone in on the ambiguities and omissions. They ask: "Why would Turing omit this rule, while carefully stating other rules? Is this ommission significant? Does the outcome of the test change when we make people unaware?" That is not bizarre, as much as it petty.

Another problem I see with the Test, and this may be controversial, but: Turing creates a test for intelligence and as the basis he takes the distinction between male and female. Then he replaces the male with a machine and asks us: if we lose our gender guessing game as often as before then machines can think. This assumes that Turing thought that he could distinguish males from females by questioning their intellect (as for small-talk both players could easily lie about that). Which at the time of the paper may have been realistic, but in modern times is not the case: If you have an adversarial male and a female who try to trick you, I don't think I could make a distinction at all: My guess would be as good as random.

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

#159
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is it morally wrong for me to create a program consisting only of a singular red button, that when pushed, sets the sad flag? We could discover tomorrow that there's a "sad ganglia" in the human brain that can be set on or off with an electromagnetic field. Does that mean that humans are ultimately biological machines without rights?

Perhaps, but "feelings" are more complicated than that. Pain isn't just a little flag that gets set to TRUE. At the very least, it's rewiring your neurons to avoid that experience, initiating instincts, and affecting your entire brain.

Definitely, but then again any AI worth a damn isn't going to have a "sad flag" either.

My point was that understanding the nature of an emotion in a trivial way should be orthogonal to how we think about what rights that being should have. At some level, we're all machines. Just because one's software runs in silicon vs gray matter; just because one's hardware was deliberately built and is understandable in computing terms doesn't mean that we really understand what it is to be sentient with respect to rights to be free and exist.

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

#160
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The specifics of the Turing Test have been debated for decades. It is clear that different versions and interpretations exist, especially now we have moved on from behaviorism that was popular during the time Turing wrote the paper. > From your quotes it only says that player A is to be replaced with a machine, not that player C is to be made aware of this replacement. I do agree that that is the popular interpreta…

The quotes you gave were certainly relevant, but still: Turing doesn't state in his paper that the interrogator is to be made aware (all I said). The rest is our modern interpretation of the test. It's a fine interpretation that I don't have a problem with, but it is an interpretation, not a criteria lifted from the paper. In the article Kurzweil even says as much: Turing was carefully imprecise in setting the rules…

In Turing's paper he suggests a game with a man and a woman and a human interogator. The human knows that there is one woman and one man and the interogator has to discover which is which.

Turing then suggests using this game, but with a computer instead of a woman.

It is a perverse interpretation of the paper to suggest that the human interrogator does not know that they are talking to one human and one computer.

To reach that conclusion you have to mangle the meaning of normal every day English words.

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