Tag: Turing Test

Turing And The Village Verificationist: The AGI That Wasn’t

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Alan Turing in the 1930s. Image credit: Public Domain.

“The moment someone mentions the Turing test at you, assume they know nothing.” This somewhat grandstanding declaration comes from an AI in Tom Sweterlitsch’s recent novel The Gone World. Earlier, the AI had confided that its creator—of whom it is a digital replica—had considered it a ‘failure of consciousness’, a ‘simulation’, but not the real deal. The implication here is clear: passing the Turing test may be a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion for being more than a mere ‘simulation’. So what, exactly, is it that passing this test allows us to conclude?

A recent comment in Nature with the provocative title ‘Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear’ argues that what it calls ‘Turing’s vision’ has been realized: current LLMs do, indeed, pass the Turing test with flying colors. This is certainly a remarkable achievement: for the first time in history, we have non-human, indeed artificial entities that we can talk to, ask things, discuss with, bat ideas back and forth with, and so on, almost exactly as if we were talking to another human—one with a large percentage of the collective knowledge of humanity at their fingertips, no less. Indeed, just this morning a brief conversation with ChatGPT helped me sort out an issue with a piece of code I use to track appointments and tasks on a wall-mounted e-paper display that’d started misbehaving. But what, exactly, should be the takeaway from this?

According to the authors of the Nature comment, it is that ‘[g]eneral intelligence can indeed emerge from simple learning rules applied at scale to patterns latent in human language’ and that hence ‘[o]ur place in the world, and our understanding of mind, will not be the same’. This, if true, would be nothing short of revolutionary: we are, right now, sharing this planet with intelligences every bit our equal, yet products of code and mathematics, rather than of evolution and biology. But while I don’t exactly share the dismissive attitude of Sweterlitsch’s AI, I do believe there is a lot of middle ground hastily excluded here. Read more »

Monday, July 25, 2022

Clever Cogs: Ants, AI, And The Slippery Idea Of Intelligence

Posted on by Jochen Szangolies

by Jochen Szangolies

Figure 1: The Porphyrian Tree. Detail of a fresco at the Kloster Schussenried. Image credit: modified from Franz Georg Hermann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The arbor porphyriana is a scholastic system of classification in which each individual or species is categorized by means of a sequence of differentiations, going from the most general to the specific. Based on the categories of Aristotle, it was introduced by the 3rd century CE logician Porphyry, and a huge influence on the development of medieval scholastic logic. Using its system of differentiae, humans may be classified as ‘substance, corporeal, living, sentient, rational’. Here, the lattermost term is the most specific—the most characteristic of the species. Therefore, rationality—intelligence—is the mark of the human.

However, when we encounter ‘intelligence’ in the news, these days, chances are that it is used not as a quintessentially human quality, but in the context of computation—reporting on the latest spectacle of artificial intelligence, with GPT-3 writing scholarly articles about itself or DALL·E 2 producing close-to-realistic images from verbal descriptions. While this sort of headline has become familiar, lately, a new word has risen in prominence at the top of articles in the relevant publications: the otherwise innocuous modifier ‘general’. Gato, a model developed by DeepMind, we’re told is a ‘generalist’ agent, capable of performing more than 600 distinct tasks. Indeed, according to Nando de Freitas, team lead at DeepMind, ‘the game is over’, with merely the question of scale separating current models from truly general intelligence.

There are several interrelated issues emerging from this trend. A minor one is the devaluation of intelligence as the mark of the human: just as Diogenes’ plucked chicken deflates Plato’s ‘featherless biped’, tomorrow’s AI models might force us to rethink our self-image as ‘rational animals’. But then, arguably, Twitter already accomplishes that.

Slightly more worrying is a cognitive bias in which we take the lower branches of Porphyry’s tree to entail the higher ones. Read more »

Monday, May 31, 2010

Cerebral Imperialism

Posted on by Richard Eskow

Neurons The present is where the future comes to die, or more accurately, where an infinite array of possible futures all collapse into one. We live in a present where artificial intelligence hasn't been invented, despite a quarter century of optimistic predictions. John Horgan in Scientific American suggests we're a long way from developing it, despite all the optimistic predictions (although when it does come it may well be as a sudden leap into existence, a sudden achievement of critical mass). However and whenever (or if ever) it arrives, it's an idea worth discussing today. But, a question: Does this line of research suffer from “cerebral imperialism”?

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The idea of “cerebral imperialism” came up in an interview I did for the current issue of Tricycle, a Buddhist magazine, with transhumanist professor and writer James “J” Hughes. One exchange went like this:

Eskow: There seems to be a kind of cognitive imperialism among some Transhumanists that says the intellect alone is “self.” Doesn’t saying “mind” is who we are exclude elements like body, emotion, culture, and our environment? Buddhism and neuroscience both suggest that identity is a process in which many elements co-arise to create the individual experience on a moment-by-moment basis. The Transhumanists seem to say, “I am separate, like a data capsule that can be uploaded or moved here and there.”

You’re right. A lot of our Transhumanist subculture comes out of computer science— male computer science—so a lot of them have that traditional “intelligence is everything” view. s soon as you start thinking about the ability to embed a couple of million trillion nanobots in your brain and back up your personality and memory onto a chip, or about advanced artificial intelligence deeply wedded with your own mind, or sharing your thoughts and dreams and feelings with other people, you begin to see the breakdown of the notion of discrete and continuous self.

An intriguing answer – one of many Hughes offers in the interview – but I was going somewhere else: toward the idea that cognition itself, that thing which we consider “mind,” is over-emphasized in our definition of self and therefore is projected onto our efforts to create something we call “artificial intelligence.”

Is the “society of mind” trying to colonize the societies of body and emotion?

Read more »