
Alan Turing’s “Can Computers Think?” Radio Broadcasts Re-Recorded - sohkamyung
http://aperiodical.com/2018/01/ive-re-recorded-alan-turings-can-computers-think-radio-broadcasts/
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feral
Looking forward to listening to this recording; I'm always telling people
interested in the philosphy of AI to read Turing's papers, as, like the author
says, they are surprisingly relevant.

Have to comment on this though:

" Turing then makes one firm prediction, that by the end of the 20th century
computers would be able to answer questions in a manner indistinguishable from
a human being – this is the famous Turing test. Turing’s prediction may have
been a couple of decades early, _but with the rise of digital assistants I
would have to say he was completely right_. "

The bit I've italicized is nonsense in an article by someone studying Turing's
work. The Turing test is clearly designed as a pragmatic definition of a
sufficient test for AI, and assumes a sophisticated human judge. The idea that
just because we are building digital assistants we are some how close to
passing the Turing test and making genuinely thinking machines doesn't hold up
at all.

I don't think that argument would have impressed Turing, and I'm sure he'd
rather we say his prediction was wrong than introduce confusion here. We have
so much confusion on this issue, which Turing tried so hard to dispel, it's a
pity to see more.

~~~
GolDDranks
Indeed, the virtue of the Turing test is that it's a very general framework –
the freedom of the framework allows us to test the AI using any
communicational method at hand. One of such is Winograd Schemas [1] – a test
of commonsensical reasoning, in which the current conversational AIs
spectacularly fail at.

[1]
[https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WS....](https://cs.nyu.edu/faculty/davise/papers/WinogradSchemas/WS.html)

~~~
GolDDranks
Btw. here is a sketch of an embedding like that:

[Session starts]

<Challenger> Hi.

<Judge> Hi. Now, listen to me. My job here is to judge whether you are a human
or an AI. I also know that your job is to try and persuade me to believe you
are a human, no matter which one you really are. I happen to have a few
questions that are easy for humans and hard for AIs. So if you are a human,
answering them shouldn't be a problem to you, but if you avoid answering, I'm
going to judge that you are an AI, no excuses. Here is the first question: ...

[A pattern of Winograd schema challenges ensues.]

So as we can see, the Turing test doesn't have to be any random chitchat nor
it doesn't have to pretend to be "normal human-to-human-like discussion", as
the Judge has the ability to participate and steer the conversation and zero
in on the areas that are most likely to expose the AI.

However, if the human participants don't have any penalty from being labeled
as AI, this doesn't obviously work, as they don't have any pressure to prove
anything. So this kind of an embedding wouldn't work with "imitation game"
-like rules, but it would work with "prove your human-ness" -like rules.

~~~
Retric
If you classify say 50% of people as AI's and 50% of AI's as people then those
AI's passed the Turing test.

So, you are limited to questions that most people will answer correctly.
Further, if you find some unusual question that works today someone can just
add it to the program for next time.

~~~
edmccard
>If you classify say 50% of people as AI's and 50% of AI's as people then
those AI's passed the Turing test.

And if your version of the test is "heads it's an AI, tails it's human" then
any AI's that are classified as human will have "passed the Turing test."

~~~
Retric
I don't think you understood.

The original test specifically had exactly one human and one AI. So, if the
judge is forced to do a coin flip that really is success. If the judge does a
coin flip because they are lazy then that's not a Turning test.

------
pveierland
In his paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" [1], I found Turing's
focus on the storage capacity of a machine as much as the computation speed of
a machine to be interesting. In particular, his prediction specifies a
concrete expectation of storage capacity, but not of computation speed:

"I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme
computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the
imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70
per cent. chance of making the right identification after five minutes of
questioning."

Which would be 125 MB in the year 2000. A good personal computer in the year
2000 would have 512 MB of memory and an 80 GB disk [2], while the top
supercomputer [3] had 6 TB of memory and 160 TB of disk storage [4].

"Of course the digital computer must have an adequate storage capacity as well
as working sufficiently fast."

[1]
[http://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf](http://phil415.pbworks.com/f/TuringComputing.pdf)

[2] [http://www.topdesignmag.com/top-performance-computer-
looked-...](http://www.topdesignmag.com/top-performance-computer-looked-the-
year-2000/)

[3]
[https://www.top500.org/list/2000/11/](https://www.top500.org/list/2000/11/)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_White)

~~~
marcosdumay
Well, and some 6 years later computers with 1GB of memory were common. That's
not too much error for a prediction made in 1950.

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inetsee
As much as I admire Turing (I've often wondered what our world would be like
if he hadn't died as young as he did), I've never been that convinced of the
value of the Turing Test.

Given a choice between

1) software that can carry on a convincing conversation about sports,
politics, music, movies, current events, etc. and

2) software that is obviously an AI that can do medical diagnosis and
treatment planning better than 90% of human doctors,

and I'll take number 2 in a heartbeat.

In the future an AI that can do both will probably be developed, but right now
I genuinely believe more effort should be spent on solving problem #2.

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
When I get pulled over I will apply the Turing test to see if the officer is
in a good mood, smart, or robocop.

~~~
nofilter
On that note; I'm pretty sure Trump will fail the Turing test.

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timlukins
Some tother related historic broadcasts can be accessed here
[http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~dm/dm.html](http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/~dm/dm.html)
at the home page of the late Donald Michie (who worked alongside Turing).
Sadly the presentation he gave back in 2007 at Informatics in Edinburgh, which
I was very lucky to attend, is missing.

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mrec
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the
question of whether a submarine can swim." \-- Edsger Dijkstra

~~~
zmeden
Turing states a very similar thing in his "Computing Machinery and
Intelligence paper" and goes on to form a more interesting question (the
Turing test):

"If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by
examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion
that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to
be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd.
Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by
another"

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hateful
I love this guy. His videos on Numberphile are great.

