Technology

60473 readers

4390 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

310

The Turing Test, enshrined by the public and media as THE test of machine intelligence, really isn't. (www.thenewatlantis.com)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

59 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Computer pioneer Alan Turing's remarks in 1950 on the question, "Can machines think?" were misquoted, misinterpreted and morphed into the so-called "Turing Test". The modern version says if you can't tell the difference between communicating with a machine and a human, the machine is intelligent. What Turing actually said was that by the year 2000 people would be using words like "thinking" and "intelligent" to describe computers, because interacting with them would be so similar to interacting with people. Computer scientists do not sit down and say alrighty, let's put this new software to the Turing Test - by Grabthar's Hammer, it passed! We've achieved Artificial Intelligence!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I always saw it more as pragmatism relating to humanity and being possibly extended to machine intelligence by association. When you talk with another person you have no real way of knowing that they are separate conscious entities, intelligent and self aware in the way you perceive yourself to be. But if they talk and act in a way that is suggestive of that then the best and simplest working practice is to assume it. This same practicality should extend to include artificial intelligence as applicable.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Yes I think that's generally what Alan Turing meant - he was careful not to define what "intelligence" means, and was discussing practical perception of machine behavior.