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Algorithms that can write heartfelt posts like yours will be developed one day. This is literally the point of Turing's thought experiment: if a machine gives

by Jabbles 11y ago

Algorithms that can write heartfelt posts like yours will be developed one day. This is literally the point of Turing's thought experiment: if a machine gives you answers indistinguishable from a human, is it alive?

paulojreis 11y ago
If a call center operator follows a "answering" algorithm strictly, is it a computer? These thought experiments are very interesting and thought provoking. But - still - it's a mathematician asking if something is alive/human. Not the most authoritative source on the subject matter.
- josh2600 11y ago
  Yes. The original computers were women in warehouses calculating actuary tables. They had a set of criteria to perform evaluations of numbers. In short, you can reduce a subset of the human experience to algorithmic emulation, which, in effect, reduces a human to a computer. It's sort of what it means to do any job to be frank.
  - paulojreis 11y ago
    I meant a electronic computer, but well put. > In short, you can reduce a subset of the human experience to algorithmic emulation, which, in effect, reduces a human to a computer. You're underestimating everything associated with being human. The computer won't make mistakes because a familiar is sick. He won't perform slower than usual because he slept less. He won't have a urge to poop affecting is performance, also. This is somewhat what I meant: these thought experiments are interesting, but if you look closer there's really not much to them. Human computers were, of course, computing. They didn't, however, became "not human".
    - Tiksi 11y ago
      > The computer won't make mistakes because a familiar is sick. Race conditions cause mistakes. Seems similar to having your mind elsewhere. > He won't perform slower than usual because he slept less. Didn't clean up memoery so now your computer is resource starved and running slower. > He won't have a urge to poop affecting is performance, GC pause. I feel like people often focus too much on the "implementation" when it comes to consciousness. Beyond what instinct gives us, which is really just a pre defined set of conditionals, everything we know and understand is learned, programmed in a way. I don't see why it's unfeasible that given enough time and the right environment that an AI could do the same.
      - paulojreis 11y ago
        Those are beautiful analogies. They might look good on a magazine, explaining layman how a computer behaves. However, science-wise, there's nothing to it. Or will the loss of a familiar trigger a psychiatric condition on the computer? > Beyond what instinct gives us, which is really just a pre defined set of conditionals, I don't think even neuroscientists have a definite answer to this. However, computer people - as always - do. That's, I think, the problem. A KISS approach is great; being oblivious of complexity isn't.
        Tiksi 11y ago
        Pull the cat5 from a critical nfs server and you'll see plenty of psychiatric conditions, both in computers and people. The analogies were a bit tongue in cheek, but I think they relate well enough. Why does a human have an urge to poop? Is it because of "human-ness" or because there's waste that needs to be disposed of. I don't think computer people think they have the definite answer, it's just easy to apply familiar abstractions to things when they map well. Plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern seems quite like a conditional to me, and neuroscientists seems to agree. Comparing things at a higher level doesn't mean being oblivious to the lower levels, it just means it's outside the scope you care about. If we could 1:1 replicate every single possible input/output/decision/etc that happens in the human brain with transistors and have the exact same properties as a human when interacting with it, does it really matter if the path to get to those interactions is different? To me, it doesn't. We don't define people by which neurons fire in their brain, we define them by the actions and decisions those chemical reactions cause, and I don't see why it should be any different if they're made of silicon.
skadamat 11y ago
It's a nice notion but I've yet to see an existence proof that a machine can do that. It's not about just passing the Turing test and fooling humans, I'm sure that will happen, but I mean the more nuanced qualities of how the machine fails, how it is able to tweak and be more thoughtful of the situation. When NLP / smart text systems make a tiny mistake, it's quite egregious / silly and we can immediately detect it (but since the machine lacks knowledge of social constructs, physics of the world, idioms, and other idiosyncrasies that we have, it doesn't know what it doesn't know).
- Jabbles 11y ago
  I've yet to see an existence proof that a machine can do that So you'll consider it impossible up to the point when such a machine exists?
  - EGreg 11y ago
    Responding to humans using knowledge accumulated by organically living in a society for years, is different than generating a body of text. No one says it is impossible. It is more a question of whether our current efforts are enough to get us to the point. Can we get to another galaxy? Probably, if we have enough resources and we discover enough to do it, and we actually go through with it. But it can seem unlikely, even given an unlimited amount of time. Not to mention that we as a species may be facing a severe catastrophe in the future as a result of how we have populated this planet in the last 200 years. Hopefully we can avoid it, but once again are you sure?
garyrob 11y ago
"Algorithms that can write heartfelt posts like yours will be developed one day." I don't find it hard to assume that algorithms will one day be able to write posts that an observer may classify as seeming to be heartfelt. But that doesn't mean that the machine actually experienced anything in writing it. That it's "heartfelt"-seeming post was actually felt by the algorithm at all. "This is literally the point of Turing's thought experiment: if a machine gives you answers indistinguishable from a human, is it alive?" Turing assumed it was. I think the issues are orthogonal. If it is indistinguishable by a human, all that means that I can see is that it's a very effective mimic, not that it has awareness.
- Tiksi 11y ago
  And how do you know that a human experienced anything while writing a "heartfelt-seeming" post? Do you think that everyone reading that experienced it as heartfelt? Did you have the "awareness" that it was heartfelt from birth, or did you only know that because you can recognize that it's much like other writing described as "heartfelt", that is, is it something you learned? If you did in fact learn it, which I assume you did, since we're not born knowing language or even what heartfelt means, why do think that an AI couldn't learn the same? Do you think that how you "experience" it is universal to all humans? Or does it come from things you've encountered in the past. Regarding your argument about being aware of the color yellow upthread, have you asked someone that is red-green colorblind how they tell the difference or how they experience red and green? It's clearly not the same as people who can see the full "visible spectrum", so do they not have awareness of those colors? In the past when I asked a friend of mine who is red-green colorblind how he can distinguish the difference, he told me it was because he'd seen things people call red or green in the past. I asked if it was the same as the difference between colors, he said yes, but more like the difference between teal and a slightly different teal. So if you were never told what yellow is, would you be aware of it, or just know it as a slightly different orange? Personally, I know what colors are only because I know what other things of the same color look like, the same wavelength hits my retina so I know that it's the same color. How is this any different from an AI recognizing that?
  - garyrob 11y ago

by Jabbles 11y ago

paulojreis 11y ago

If a call center operator follows a "answering" algorithm strictly, is it a computer? These thought experiments are very interesting and thought provoking. But - still - it's a mathematician asking if something is alive/human. Not the most authoritative source on the subject matter.

josh2600 11y ago
Yes. The original computers were women in warehouses calculating actuary tables. They had a set of criteria to perform evaluations of numbers. In short, you can reduce a subset of the human experience to algorithmic emulation, which, in effect, reduces a human to a computer. It's sort of what it means to do any job to be frank.
- paulojreis 11y ago
  I meant a electronic computer, but well put. > In short, you can reduce a subset of the human experience to algorithmic emulation, which, in effect, reduces a human to a computer. You're underestimating everything associated with being human. The computer won't make mistakes because a familiar is sick. He won't perform slower than usual because he slept less. He won't have a urge to poop affecting is performance, also. This is somewhat what I meant: these thought experiments are interesting, but if you look closer there's really not much to them. Human computers were, of course, computing. They didn't, however, became "not human".
  - Tiksi 11y ago
    > The computer won't make mistakes because a familiar is sick. Race conditions cause mistakes. Seems similar to having your mind elsewhere. > He won't perform slower than usual because he slept less. Didn't clean up memoery so now your computer is resource starved and running slower. > He won't have a urge to poop affecting is performance, GC pause. I feel like people often focus too much on the "implementation" when it comes to consciousness. Beyond what instinct gives us, which is really just a pre defined set of conditionals, everything we know and understand is learned, programmed in a way. I don't see why it's unfeasible that given enough time and the right environment that an AI could do the same.
    - paulojreis 11y ago
      Those are beautiful analogies. They might look good on a magazine, explaining layman how a computer behaves. However, science-wise, there's nothing to it. Or will the loss of a familiar trigger a psychiatric condition on the computer? > Beyond what instinct gives us, which is really just a pre defined set of conditionals, I don't think even neuroscientists have a definite answer to this. However, computer people - as always - do. That's, I think, the problem. A KISS approach is great; being oblivious of complexity isn't.
      - Tiksi 11y ago
        Pull the cat5 from a critical nfs server and you'll see plenty of psychiatric conditions, both in computers and people. The analogies were a bit tongue in cheek, but I think they relate well enough. Why does a human have an urge to poop? Is it because of "human-ness" or because there's waste that needs to be disposed of. I don't think computer people think they have the definite answer, it's just easy to apply familiar abstractions to things when they map well. Plus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_action_pattern seems quite like a conditional to me, and neuroscientists seems to agree. Comparing things at a higher level doesn't mean being oblivious to the lower levels, it just means it's outside the scope you care about. If we could 1:1 replicate every single possible input/output/decision/etc that happens in the human brain with transistors and have the exact same properties as a human when interacting with it, does it really matter if the path to get to those interactions is different? To me, it doesn't. We don't define people by which neurons fire in their brain, we define them by the actions and decisions those chemical reactions cause, and I don't see why it should be any different if they're made of silicon.

skadamat 11y ago

It's a nice notion but I've yet to see an existence proof that a machine can do that. It's not about just passing the Turing test and fooling humans, I'm sure that will happen, but I mean the more nuanced qualities of how the machine fails, how it is able to tweak and be more thoughtful of the situation. When NLP / smart text systems make a tiny mistake, it's quite egregious / silly and we can immediately detect it (but since the machine lacks knowledge of social constructs, physics of the world, idioms, and other idiosyncrasies that we have, it doesn't know what it doesn't know).

Jabbles 11y ago
I've yet to see an existence proof that a machine can do that So you'll consider it impossible up to the point when such a machine exists?
- EGreg 11y ago
  Responding to humans using knowledge accumulated by organically living in a society for years, is different than generating a body of text. No one says it is impossible. It is more a question of whether our current efforts are enough to get us to the point. Can we get to another galaxy? Probably, if we have enough resources and we discover enough to do it, and we actually go through with it. But it can seem unlikely, even given an unlimited amount of time. Not to mention that we as a species may be facing a severe catastrophe in the future as a result of how we have populated this planet in the last 200 years. Hopefully we can avoid it, but once again are you sure?

garyrob 11y ago

"Algorithms that can write heartfelt posts like yours will be developed one day." I don't find it hard to assume that algorithms will one day be able to write posts that an observer may classify as seeming to be heartfelt. But that doesn't mean that the machine actually experienced anything in writing it. That it's "heartfelt"-seeming post was actually felt by the algorithm at all. "This is literally the point of Turing's thought experiment: if a machine gives you answers indistinguishable from a human, is it alive?" Turing assumed it was. I think the issues are orthogonal. If it is indistinguishable by a human, all that means that I can see is that it's a very effective mimic, not that it has awareness.

Tiksi 11y ago
And how do you know that a human experienced anything while writing a "heartfelt-seeming" post? Do you think that everyone reading that experienced it as heartfelt? Did you have the "awareness" that it was heartfelt from birth, or did you only know that because you can recognize that it's much like other writing described as "heartfelt", that is, is it something you learned? If you did in fact learn it, which I assume you did, since we're not born knowing language or even what heartfelt means, why do think that an AI couldn't learn the same? Do you think that how you "experience" it is universal to all humans? Or does it come from things you've encountered in the past. Regarding your argument about being aware of the color yellow upthread, have you asked someone that is red-green colorblind how they tell the difference or how they experience red and green? It's clearly not the same as people who can see the full "visible spectrum", so do they not have awareness of those colors? In the past when I asked a friend of mine who is red-green colorblind how he can distinguish the difference, he told me it was because he'd seen things people call red or green in the past. I asked if it was the same as the difference between colors, he said yes, but more like the difference between teal and a slightly different teal. So if you were never told what yellow is, would you be aware of it, or just know it as a slightly different orange? Personally, I know what colors are only because I know what other things of the same color look like, the same wavelength hits my retina so I know that it's the same color. How is this any different from an AI recognizing that?
- garyrob 11y ago