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The Turing Test is a terrible measure of sapience. Generally it involves using "average people", who have been shown time and again to be overly credulous when

The Turing Test is a terrible measure of sapience. Generally it involves using "average people", who have been shown time and again to be overly credulous when talking to these bots. If the test is to be used at all, it should consist of computer science experts instead--people familiar with the technology and bot tricks of the trade. That the Turing Test is still used is proof that we still don't understand how to even define sapience. Without a definition and concrete, testable qualities, how can we possibly hope to ever build artificial sapience. As a result, we continue to see these toys that are little more than parlor tricks. Any true test should include looking behind the curtain. "I know you're artificial--I can see the processes working--yet I have doubts that what I'm seeing is real." In other words, real success is the tester believing he is being fooled when he is not, rather than fooling the tester into believing it is real.

wslh 12y ago
I have a friend who used a sex chat bot to sell things to people. It was something very basic but incredible effective. It made me think that we need to divide the turing test for different people: by age, by need, etc.
tritium 12y ago
Generally it involves using "average people" [...] it should consist of computer science experts instead I don't agree. The prominent reason for "dumbing down" the judges follows the same reasoning behind decisions made regarding what constitutes "adequate" encryption. How can we gauge what will honestly happen out in the real world, today? Consider DES. It was deemed inadequate, but how to prove it? The EFF came up with a budget estimate based on what was reasonably affordable for a group of attackers, and built a machine capable of cracking DES within those budget constraints. http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML/19980716_eff_des_faq.html http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML... So, let's apply similar reasoning to the concept of AI. If a group of people were to build an AI, and use it as an adversary against ordinary people, how difficult is it to manipulate and deceive ordinary people into taking action, and is it feasible to do so with AI?
- mratzloff 12y ago
  Since this chat bot passed the low bar set forth, do you believe that it is intelligent? Do stage magicians perform real magic simply because they fool the audience?
  - tritium 12y ago
    I believe it's practical to maintain an awareness that the bar is as absurdly low as it seems to be, and that well-developed deception may become the norm when interacting with online entities. Do I believe that it's intelligent? Well, I wouldn't confer human rights to it. It doesn't carry the weight of emotional investment that a domestic pet might. But that's the sort of thing to stay wary of. Average people becoming emotionally invested in silly things. People being tricked into carrying around an urn full of ashes, and believing that a convincing AI truly represents their late relatives, and similar sorts of tomfoolery.
mcguire 12y ago
That we don't understand how to define intelligence is exactly the point. That's why the Turing test is interesting. The problem with "looking behind the curtain" is that it traditionally boils down to what I like to think of as the subtle fluid model of intelligence. If you know what is behind the curtain, then obviously it can't be intelligent, because it is not running on the right hardware, for gooey definitions of hardware, or because it doesn't have some Homunculus of Definite Understanding (Hi, Serle!), or because we can see behind the curtain and know what it is doing. Obviously, if we know what it is doing, it is not intelligent, right?
- cLeEOGPw 12y ago
  If you look what's behind the curtain of working brain chances are you no longer think of human brain as intelligent either. Seems that for many people though, especially in CS, intelligence gonna be something that works in a way that is complex enough for them to not understand how it works.
- gtremper 12y ago
  I was fortunate enough to take a philosophy of mind class from Searle during my Computer Science undergrad. Very interesting experience.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    It has been a while since I read him, and I don't think I ever got a satisfactory answer: how does he get around the unbounded recursion of the Chinese room argument?
    - gtremper 12y ago
      I never agreed with him completely on his views in this regard, but his main point is if you have a system that's governed by rules on input (Like someone looking up the answer in the Chinese room), there's no subjective understanding. So even if you had such a device(room) that behaved flawlessly, there's nothing in there that actually "understands" what's going on. The paper that the Chinese characters are written on doesn't understand, they're paper. And the person carrying out the instructions doesn't understand either, they're just following orders. So what's having the subjective experience/understanding? The main point I took away is that he feels that consciences is an ordinary biological process, and a simulation of that process is not the same as the process. In the same way that a computer simulation of a stomach digesting food isn't the same as an actually stomach digesting food. No matter how good the simulation is, it doesn't actually digest food. So a simulation of consciences, isn't actually consciences, and doesn't have a personal subjective experience.
pjc50 12y ago
"I know you're artificial--I can see the processes working" That criterion implies that once we have a much better understanding of the brain that humans might start failing it. What if you have a neuronal tracedump for a person involved in a conversation?

wslh 12y ago

I have a friend who used a sex chat bot to sell things to people. It was something very basic but incredible effective. It made me think that we need to divide the turing test for different people: by age, by need, etc.

tritium 12y ago

Generally it involves using "average people" [...] it should consist of computer science experts instead I don't agree. The prominent reason for "dumbing down" the judges follows the same reasoning behind decisions made regarding what constitutes "adequate" encryption. How can we gauge what will honestly happen out in the real world, today? Consider DES. It was deemed inadequate, but how to prove it? The EFF came up with a budget estimate based on what was reasonably affordable for a group of attackers, and built a machine capable of cracking DES within those budget constraints. http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML/19980716_eff_des_faq.html http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/Crypto/Crypto_misc/DESCracker/HTML... So, let's apply similar reasoning to the concept of AI. If a group of people were to build an AI, and use it as an adversary against ordinary people, how difficult is it to manipulate and deceive ordinary people into taking action, and is it feasible to do so with AI?

mratzloff 12y ago
Since this chat bot passed the low bar set forth, do you believe that it is intelligent? Do stage magicians perform real magic simply because they fool the audience?
- tritium 12y ago
  I believe it's practical to maintain an awareness that the bar is as absurdly low as it seems to be, and that well-developed deception may become the norm when interacting with online entities. Do I believe that it's intelligent? Well, I wouldn't confer human rights to it. It doesn't carry the weight of emotional investment that a domestic pet might. But that's the sort of thing to stay wary of. Average people becoming emotionally invested in silly things. People being tricked into carrying around an urn full of ashes, and believing that a convincing AI truly represents their late relatives, and similar sorts of tomfoolery.

mcguire 12y ago

That we don't understand how to define intelligence is exactly the point. That's why the Turing test is interesting. The problem with "looking behind the curtain" is that it traditionally boils down to what I like to think of as the subtle fluid model of intelligence. If you know what is behind the curtain, then obviously it can't be intelligent, because it is not running on the right hardware, for gooey definitions of hardware, or because it doesn't have some Homunculus of Definite Understanding (Hi, Serle!), or because we can see behind the curtain and know what it is doing. Obviously, if we know what it is doing, it is not intelligent, right?

cLeEOGPw 12y ago
If you look what's behind the curtain of working brain chances are you no longer think of human brain as intelligent either. Seems that for many people though, especially in CS, intelligence gonna be something that works in a way that is complex enough for them to not understand how it works.
gtremper 12y ago
I was fortunate enough to take a philosophy of mind class from Searle during my Computer Science undergrad. Very interesting experience.
- mcguire 12y ago
  It has been a while since I read him, and I don't think I ever got a satisfactory answer: how does he get around the unbounded recursion of the Chinese room argument?
  - gtremper 12y ago
    I never agreed with him completely on his views in this regard, but his main point is if you have a system that's governed by rules on input (Like someone looking up the answer in the Chinese room), there's no subjective understanding. So even if you had such a device(room) that behaved flawlessly, there's nothing in there that actually "understands" what's going on. The paper that the Chinese characters are written on doesn't understand, they're paper. And the person carrying out the instructions doesn't understand either, they're just following orders. So what's having the subjective experience/understanding? The main point I took away is that he feels that consciences is an ordinary biological process, and a simulation of that process is not the same as the process. In the same way that a computer simulation of a stomach digesting food isn't the same as an actually stomach digesting food. No matter how good the simulation is, it doesn't actually digest food. So a simulation of consciences, isn't actually consciences, and doesn't have a personal subjective experience.

pjc50 12y ago

"I know you're artificial--I can see the processes working" That criterion implies that once we have a much better understanding of the brain that humans might start failing it. What if you have a neuronal tracedump for a person involved in a conversation?