Posted on 06/08/2014 12:23:30 PM PDT by RoosterRedux
Eugene Goostman seems like a typical 13-year-old Ukrainian boy — at least, that's what a third of judges at a Turing Test competition this Saturday thought. Goostman says that he likes hamburgers and candy and that his father is a gynecologist, but it's all a lie. This boy is a program created by computer engineers led by Russian Vladimir Veselov and Ukrainian Eugene Demchenko.
That a third of judges were convinced that Goostman was a human is significant — at least 30 percent of judges must be swayed for a computer to pass the famous Turing Test. The test, created by legendary computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, was designed to answer the question "Can machines think?" and is a well-known staple of artificial intelligence studies.
Goostman passed the test at the Turing Test 2014 competition in London on Saturday, and the event's organizers at the University of Reading say it's the first computer succeed. Professor Kevin Warwick, a visiting professor at the university, noted in a release that "some will claim that the Test has already been passed." He added that "the words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world," but "this event involved the most simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted."
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
I thought a Turing test was supposed to be about sentience.
/johnny
The lead for labor from most of humanity is disappearing. This is a profound change, and I don’t think society is at all prepared.
Like it or not, at least two-thirds of society will soon be sitting at home waiting watching TV, thinking about using their EBT card to buy lobster, and wondering if going out to cause random violence might be a nice way to pass the time.
The remaining third will be working at demanding jobs that cannot (yet) be done by machine. And they will be wondering why society hates them for being successful.
No easy solution to this — and, so far, we’re barely thinking about the solution at all.
“need for labor”
And Turing did not anticipate people designing programs solely to pass a Turing test.
This is a fool's errand.
The real test is: Can computers desire?
No, a herring has a useful purpose. You can chop down a tree with one. Wolfie has no purpose or intelligence.
Then a flat rock it is.
I dunno man...you can pave a path with a flat rock. I think Wolfie is nearly unique. If it wasn’t for the Dems and GOP he’d be one of a kind. But since they serve no useful purpose, nor show intelligence either he has company.
Oh great. When fast food workers can’t get $15 an hour because no one needs them they will expect to get that much from welfare.
“I spent time with a real 14 year old boy yesterday. I’m not convinced he could pass a Turing test....”
Now that was good.
If that concept were true it seems like we would have experienced the crisis decades or even centuries ago. Machines have been doing increasingly huge amounts of work for people for a long time now, yet the employment rate has remained fairly constant. Machines do displace people, but apparently there is feedback in the system that creates an offsetting new need for people to work. I suspect it has something to do with the creation of new opportunities. That is, any particular industry or area of endeavor will require increasingly less human work due to increasing automation, but this is offset by an increasing number of industries. It’s sort of like plunging into a fractal. You never hit bottom because it just keeps branching out. Maybe the key is to not be spooked by the dystopian implications of a flawed static model but to keep on pedaling.
Once upon a time, nearly everyone engaged in subsistence-level farming. You worked hard, in hopes that your children wouldn't die.
We made advancements, and famines became diminished.
With improved food production (in part thru machinery), more people left the land and worked in factories.
Factories raised standards of living. People began to have cash, they had "stuff", they had leisure time.
Technology made production easier, and the percentage of people in manufacturing went down; we moved more toward a service economy.
The early 21st century joke was: "You want fries with that?" because service level jobs kinda suck.
Now the burger flipping jobs are being replaced by machines.
So, no farming jobs, no manufacturing jobs, no service sector jobs. That long transition of "where we need workers" has played itself out.
What's the next place for low-skill people to go? You tell me that.
I'm guessing your best answer is: "We'll find something. We always do."
And I say: "Not this time."
How hopeful are you?
/johnny
That’s exactly my answer. I don’t see that you’ve identified an opposing principle. People have worried about being displaced by machines for a long time but it never pans out. We’re fairly amazing creatures and someone always comes along with a new idea that makes the perennial worry invalid.
That's a lot harder to do these days. For some time now, cars--unless they are malfunctioning--have produced almost no carbon monoxide.
I suppose if you left the car running long enough, it might use up most of the oxygen in the garage. Then, perhaps, the catalytic converters would be unable to oxidize the CO to CO2, but you'd better have a pretty tight garage and a full tank of gas.
People are regularly displaced by machines...ergo their worries are well founded.
Fortunately, new jobs are created by those machines.
Technological progress has created a moving horizon since the beginning of time. So far, things have worked out pretty well.
But we still worry about the machines we create. Will there come a point at which they are no longer our slaves?
That point is what Kurzweil calls the Singularity.
And we on the cusp of it.
What happens afterward is not something I would speculate on (well maybe a little bit;-)).
/johnny
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