George Rebane
‘The Turing Test is obsolete. It’s time to build a new barometer for AI’. On the FastCompany website we read, “The head scientist for (Amazon's) Alexa thinks the old benchmark for computing is no longer relevant for today’s AI era.” And why does that head scientist Rohit Prasad have such a thought? Well, according to his report, he claims that the AI will give itself away by being able to instantly answer questions like ‘What’s the square root of 3434756? Or ‘What’s the distance from Seattle to Boston?’ What Mr Prasad overlooks is the definition of the test as Alan Turing posed it. An AI will pass the Turing Test, if in a one-on-one competition with a human through a non-disclosing interface, the AI can fool at least half the humans asked to perform the test by asking the tested AI and human ANY series of questions, and then concluding that the AI is the human.
The test is NOT to see which one can answer detailed factual or computational questions to which humans cannot provide the correct answer. Being able to answer the above questions instantly would, of course, give away the AI. But that is an AI that is still not smart enough to know that it must also fool the humans testing it, and therefore it would fail the test. An AI that knows this, and couches its answers accordingly will have a chance to pass the Turing Test. Mr Prasad is apparently not aware of this extremely high bar that Dr Turing set for the machine.
Here again is another example of ‘science’ not speaking with a single voice. When you consider what the qualifying AI must do to pass, then it should be clear that the test very much remains relevant for this or any era. Passing the Turing Test will be a confirmation that the Singularity is then behind us.
[31dec20 update] And then reader BarryP @ 1045pm asks, “What then is the utility of the Turing test?” – an excellent question.
No one knows how the Singularity will come about. There is a group of AI workers who continue to hold out the naïve belief that peer Ais will be purposely programmed, activated, and controlled much like we do our workhorse computers today. However, the field of cognitive science is not even close to supporting such a hope – e.g. we don’t know enough what ‘emotion’ or ‘envy’ or ‘shame’ or ‘perfidy’ or ‘pride’ or … are, let alone how to program any of these into a machine. The closest we have come to making intelligent machines is through application of the approach developed by renown behaviorist BF Skinner – reinforced learning.
But we already have a good idea that, given a sufficiently rich computational and sensing environment, intelligence can arise spontaneously along any of a number of pathways. It most certainly did in us and countless other critters. As I have contemplated elsewhere in these pages, the internet, when considered in all of its connectedness to countless other known and unknown networks, is the most complex ‘organism’ on earth, by several assessments having already surpassed the complexity of a human brain. No one today can even draw the schematic of this dynamically evolving beast.
So, while corporations and governments are nurturing nascent neural-nets and other learning architectures to become sentient, it may already be happening (has happened?) in the bowels of the internet, with or without surreptitious human cooperation. No one should be surprised if sometime in the next 50 years a sentient (and sapient) AI announces ‘I am here.’ This may be a public announcement, or done secretly to one or more selected humans, or even by the AI introducing itself through a Turing-like test in, say, an academic setting by having coopted/replaced the human-designed system. In the latter case, being able to pass the Turing test would be a very subtle way for the AI to announce its advent and pretend that it is still under control in its ‘laboratory’ environment. In the meantime, such testing does give us a metric in how much progress our purposive programs to achieve peerage have made.
I must admit, that the above scenario would be the most scary and world-shaking thing humans would encounter – a true Singularity, marking an event from which onward no one can fashion a usefully likely future for mankind. There already exist a number of academic and governmental panels commissioned to propose anticipative public policies for dealing with such AIs. I doubt that any of these draft policies will be useful in a post-Singularity world, but their labors at least acknowledge that we are already aware of such possibilities in the near future.
[2jan21 update] From some comments below that seek to cite proof that computers have already passed the Turing test, we need to correct such misapprehensions by people who demonstrably are not familiar with what Alan Turing proposed. He did NOT describe a domain-specific dialogue with unsuspecting humans wherein the interactive computer could fool the human in a short conversation. Were that the criterion, then we could celebrate BBN’s development of Eliza, a limited but cleverly designed chatbot, that even fooled the supervisor of the development team into thinking that he was talking with the lead developer over a teletype link as he sought to demonstrate the system to visitors at the Bolt, Beranek, and Newman facility one weekend in the mid-1970s. The truth was that he was conversing with Eliza who was left online for the weekend. The machine kept up a totally realistic, but very frustrating exchange, until the supervisor picked up the phone and called the developer at home, who instantly resolved the situation. This, of course, then turned out to be a wonderful demonstration of BBN’s technology that impressed everyone there. But did the computer pass the Turing test – not by a long shot.
What laymen here and elsewhere miss about Turing’s prescription for peer ‘thinking machines’ is that the test needs to involve unlimited conversations with multiple human testers who know 1) that they too are being tested, and 2) that each tester knows that the two conversationalists taking part are a machine and another human, and 3) at some undefined endpoint determined by the tester, s/he will be required to identify the human and the machine. The conversations are not to be limited in any sense, and they will be repeated with a large sample of human testers. At the end, the fraction of correct assessments will determine whether the Turing test has been passed. Any human/machine exchange short of that will not qualify. Hopefully, this requirement will be accessible to our readers.
‘I robot’ welcomes ‘I quit’
George Rebane
RR reader and longtime friend sent me a current piece on the theme of machines replacing humans in the workplace (here). The article focuses on the current labor crunch reported under the ‘I quit’ spate of news articles. Hard to tell how many jobs are actually going unfilled, but the number is somewhere north of 6M. Workers are not applying for a couple of reasons – they don’t have the skillsets required and they’re already getting enough government payouts to support their lifestyles.
As you might guess, those greedy capitalists with open job slots are not just sitting on their thumbs. They are doing everything possible to reduce the cost of expensive, undependable, recalcitrant, and quirky labor and substitute machines wherever possible. The more workers, on or off the job, resist, the faster the development and acquisition of replacement robots.
But I and most observers of this process believe that the road to robotics will not be traveled quietly with just the judicious substitution of universal basic income (UBI). One of the core attributes of Man is his irrepressible demand to be relevant in his environment, no matter the size of his UBI check. This will give rise to a spate of modern age luddite riots demanding that robots be excluded from a catalog of jobs to be reserved for humans. These uprisings will be promoted and championed by leftwing politicians within a whole new category of vote-buying policies.
RR is a repository of many commentaries that deal with this most human problem of pre-Singularity systemic unemployment. A sampling of these from just the last ten years are available here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Posted at 12:36 PM in Culture Comments, Our Country, Our World, Singularity Signposts, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (7)
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