this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
310 points (95.1% liked)

Technology

60473 readers
4390 users here now

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

Our Rules

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

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[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] 22 points 4 days ago (3 children)

The programs don't really understand Chinese either. They are just filled with an understanding that is provided to them up-front. I mean as in they do not derive that understanding from something they perceive where there was no understanding before, they don't draw conclusions, don't understand words from context,.... the way an intelligent being would learn a language.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Nothing in the thought experiment says that the program doesn't behave that way. If the program really seems like it understands language to an outside observer, you would assume it did learn language that way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Programs clearly understand words from context. Try making it do translation tasks, it can properly translate "tear" to either 泪水 (tears from crying) or 撕破 (to rend) based on context

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

Others have provided better answers than mine, pointing out that the Chinese room argument only makes sense if your premise is that a “program” is qualitatively different from what goes on in a human brain/mind.