this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2025
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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]
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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!

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

The Turing Test codified the very real fact that computer AI systems up till a few years ago couldn't hold a conversation (outside of special conversational tricks like Eliza and Cleverbot). Deep neural networks and the attention mechanism changed the situation; it's not a completely solved problem, but the improvement is undeniably dramatic. It's now possible to treat chatbots as a rudimentary research assistant, for example.

It's just something we have to take in stride, like computers becoming capable of playing Chess or Go. There is no need to get hung up on the word "intelligence".

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Not sure how you define getting "hung up" but there are tons of poorly informed people who believe/fear that AI is about to take over/conquer/destroy/whatever the world because they think LLMs are as smart as humans - or just a few tweaks away. It's less about the word "intelligence" than about jumping from there to collateral issues, like thinking LLMs are "persons" that deserve rights, that using them without their consent is slavery, and other nonsense. Manipulative people take advantage of this kind of ignorance. Knowledge is good, modern superstition is bad.

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

They are going to destroy the world, not because they are superintelligent but because LLMs will be linked to lethal weapons and critical machines since it's easier to learn than a human and since they are very not reliant (prompt injection, purposely lying, etc.), this will lead to death

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

It's just something we have to take in stride, like computers becoming capable of playing Chess or Go. There is no need to get hung up on the word "intelligence".

Nicely said.