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If you take the goalposts to have been set by Turing's 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", the only people moving them are researchers who want to trum
by arstin 10y ago
If you take the goalposts to have been set by Turing's 1950 "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", the only people moving them are researchers who want to trump up their own work or marketers who want to sell things.
My own taste uses the word "AI" as you do in a permissive way to include simpler tasks (which in themselves are more elemental than useful) like identifying an object in an image and presenting a few straightforward interpretations of sentences. But what Turing stipulated an actual AI would be able to do is "reach parity" with a fully human conversation, with all of our knowledge and values and desires and subtlety of motivation. When you really dig into what goes on in a real conversation---the joking, the shades of meaning, the individual quirks and tribal patterns, the lying, the compassion, ambition, insecurity---I think it's hard not to admit that we're still quite far from that. We may not even want it! But exactly the genius of the Turing test for setting a rough standard for AI is that it demands competences far beyond mere language processing.
- abecedarius 10y agoTuring wasn't trying there to articulate a single target for AI research, he was responding to the claim that artificial minds were not possible even in principle. His response was basically, try this, if in open-ended conversation you couldn't tell one from a human, would you really still say there's no mind there? As you say, that's a really high bar from where we are, then or now. I'm sure Turing's own goals for AI were broader than eventually passing the Turing test. He worked on neural nets himself and would've considered progress in perception as partial progress in AI.
- arstin 10y agoYep! The assertion that Turing was setting a "single target for AI research" in the way you're using the phrase was clearly not what he was doing or, I hope, what I said. My intent was the opposite: to draw attention the massive range of "targets for research" which are already implicit in the original Turing Test in order to note that saying "there's still lots more to do" is hardly "moving the goalpost". Just to link up the way you put things with the way I chose to here, his argument for how an artificial mind is possible proposes a reasonable, minimal standard which different sides can agree to---a criterion of, "well if it can do that then sure it's a mind!". And the choice of a open and unbounded conversation as the standard was brilliant because of the massive range of subcompetencies which are required for actually executing it (including, obviously, perception). Which, of course, we gradually continue to plod through in AI research.
- abecedarius 10y agoAgreed, and you're right that I mistook your intent.