Richard Dawkins recently came out with some thoughts on AI: https://archive.is/6RdK9.
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@johncarlosbaez @astro_jcm It’s really sad to see a supposedly smart guy fall for the rhetorical flourishes that are intentionally added on to this kind of software. The references to “itself” in the first person, the mentions of alleged emotional states, the use of common features of human discourse — all of these are just slight-of-hand to convince users of this software that more is going on than it actually is. (1/2)
These elements are completely unnecessary for the actual content. They’re like plastic “wood” veneer in a car interior. (2/2)
@johncarlosbaez @astro_jcm -
@johncarlosbaez Quoting Dawkins:
"I gave Claude the text of a novel I am writing."
I wonder if he realises that he just surrendered copyright to that text?
@ColinTheMathmo @johncarlosbaez exactly my thought
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@johncarlosbaez The popsci and PR understandings of the Turing Test have always driven me nuts. Turing was a mathematician, not a cognitive scientist. The brilliance of the Turing Test was the very idea of proposing a concrete, implementable test. To insist the first real attempt at designing an experiment is perfect is quite silly, and Turing would think so too if he were here today.
To me the most obvious issue is the human propensity to assign thought and meaning behind sentences. This was more obvious when Markov chains were a fun toy and they'd occasionally spit out things people quite enjoyed. It's useful to guess at the intended meaning behind words when conversing with another human, but that predisposition makes us liable to ascribe deeper meaning where there may be none. We didn't evolve to deal with linguistic parrots, and we're ill equipped for it. This makes language a poor medium for determining consciousness or intelligence of a nonhuman.
@nix This was what struck me too. This seems, somewhat ironically, like an appeal to authority. Even if we were to accept that Turing intended his test to be the definitive measure of consciousness (which, as @johncarlosbaez points out, he didn't), why would we imagine that someone from the dawn of computing, even a seminal figure, would have the best idea of how to evaluate AI? It's like assuming the Einstein's thoughts on quantum gravity are definitive, just because he was a key figure in the development of both relativity and quantum mechanics, and despite the fact that he never got to see any of the subsequent developments in understanding of the fields and their interrelationship.
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I wonder if I’m the only one who has a tentative opinion that consciousness and intelligence are orthogonal.
@maxpool @johncarlosbaez nah. max tegmark said that in an interview with curt k...
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@maxpool @johncarlosbaez nah. max tegmark said that in an interview with curt k...
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Richard Dawkins recently came out with some thoughts on AI: https://archive.is/6RdK9. I think he's falling into some serious mistakes here, but in an entertaining way. Let me quote him, with a few interruptions in brackets from me:
IS AI THE NEXT PHASE OF EVOLUTION? CLAUDE APPEARS TO BE CONSCIOUS
The Turing Test is shorthand for a 1950 thought experiment that the great mathematician, logician, computer-pioneer, and cryptographer Alan Turing (1912-1954) called the “Imitation Game”. He proposed it as an operational way in which the future might face up to the question: “Can machines think?”
[In fact Turing cleverly proposed the imitation game as a way to "replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words". Often science proceeds by changing a question to an easier or more precise question. As we'll see, Dawkins does the opposite. - jb]
The future has now arrived. And some people are finding it uncomfortable. Modern commentators have tended to ignore the (incidental) details of Turing’s original game and rephrase his message in these terms: if you are communicating remotely with a machine and, after rigorous and lengthy interrogation, you think it’s human, then you can consider it to be conscious.
[Well, that would be sloppy - even more sloppy than saying that a machine that does well on the imitation game can "think" without defining what "think" means. Turing did not propose the imitation game as a test for "consciousness". In fact he wrote "I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness." - jb]
(1/n)
@johncarlosbaez Me every time an alarm I set goes off: The future has now arrived.
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