Machines | Walter Isaacson on Alan Turing, Intelligent Machines and "The Imitation Game"
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Biographer Walter Isaacson compares Alan Turing's computing philosophy with that of Ada Lovelace a hundred years prior. Turing, the subject of the new film "The Imitation Game," is also featured prominently in Isaacson's new book "The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution." (http://goo.gl/YpWNOU) Read more at BigThink.com: http://bigthink.com/think-tank/walter-isaacson-on-alan-turing Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink Transcript - It’s great to trace things back to Alan Turing. You know he’s in Bletchley Park, England. He had come up with the concept of the universal computing machine but then he has to help put it in practice to break the German wartime code. So he comes up with a device called the bomb and then colossus and these are machines that can break the code and he starts thinking about the difference between human imagination and machine intelligence. And it goes back to what he calls Lady Lovelace’s objection. It goes back to Ada Lovelace a hundred years earlier who had said machines will be able to do everything except think. And so Turing comes up with what he calls the imitation game. Now we call it the Turing test in which he tries to figure out how would you tell the difference between a human and a machine. How would you know the machine’s not intelligent. He says well put a human and a machine in a different room, we send them in questions and if after a while you can’t tell which one’s a machine and which one’s a human, then it makes no sense to say the machine isn’t thinking. Now you can have philosophical arguments about whether or not that’s a good test but ever since then, it’s been about 65 years since he came up with that concept, we’ve been trying to invent machines that would pass the Turing test or the imitation game. Every now and then you read about a machine that can sort of do conversational gambits and maybe confuse a person for five minutes or so and sort of try to pass the Turing test. But surprisingly we found it very difficult to have machines that can really carry on a conversation and be confused with a human. You can usually tell the machine from the human. A different way of looking at the way the computer age evolved is sort of Ada Lovelace’s way which is that computers and humans will evolve symbiotically. They’ll be partners. We will get more intimately connected to our machines and the machines will amplify our intelligence and our creativity will amplify what the machines could do. And we don’t need to try to create robots that’ll work without us. It’s kind of cooler to create this partnership of humans and technology or as she put it the humanities and engineering. So those are really the two schools of thought in computer programming. And every now and then you hear people say the singularity’s coming or we’re about to get to the age of artificial intelligence and machine learning. And I suspect it may come but it’s always about 20 years away. And in the meantime it’s sort of the Ada Lovelace vision rather than the Alan Turing vision. The vision of having machines that connect to us more intimately rather than replace us and don’t need us anymore. Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton
Comments
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Turing did not 'come up' with Colossus it was other members of the team at Bletchley Park who did that, principally Tommy Flowers.
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Recently a non computer friend suggested I see the movie. Thank You Walter for reminding me about the Turing test, and the explanation of the movie's title. I have been dong computer since early childhood. Physically close to MIT attended and read many papers on Neural nets. If the definition of a positive Turing test is a successful "Expert System", then I have done a few. Capturing the knowledge of an "Expert" is difficult, and developing a system that works and can learn even more is nearly impossible.
In the mid 80's the two giants of the mini computer business (Digital Equipment & Data General) delivered custom hardware solutions. Both required translation of a sales order into a list of manufactured assemblies and diagrams describing their interconnection (configuration). This engineering process was expensive and error prone.
My counterpart DEC engineer lectured for years on the merits of neural nets. Instead, I defined the problem as understanding what the best and worst human experts did (to error is human) and devised a method of defining rules to create system designs. But the real challenge was describing these rules in data rather than code, and providing a human interface to define and refine these rules.
The resulting designs were as "intelligent" as the best expert, and I considered this a passing grade for the Turing test. -
Some of your may have a different perspective after watching Parasyte the maxim.
I am all in for builing robots though :) -
It's like a monkey claiming intelligence is signified by proficient flea grooming.
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What if God is a 14 billion year old alien?
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Have the computer rap. Then you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the machine and the rapper.
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So he who has the best machinery wins ?
Isn't that how it works now ?
For a machine to show humanity , it has to be able to
" Pick Your Pocket , While Seducing You " . -
A human talking with a machine is the dream of a machine lover.
You should build a Von Neumann machine, it is practical.
Emotions are models in execution in the mind. If you want their results to affect genitals, then add these genitals to your machine. If you're seeking for health and all answers, then that is the Von Neumann machine. If you want a machine to teach a model to you, then make it optimize and see what is it doing. Humans are so blind, all answers are right in front of you, all you need to do is see without your hand in front of your eyes. -
May the symbiosis begin.
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Read the predictions of Ray Kurzweil (Mr. Singularity). This is what he's been saying for decades.
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Green ending is the best ending.
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If Mr. Isaacson had just went to a theoretical computer science class, he would know that to create a machine that truly passes the Turing test, it would require human level intelligence - which is part of Turing's original thesis. However, Mr. Isaacson is a retard who has no education related to CS or maths, and makes his living by sellings books to people who are even more gullible than himself.
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I was thinking this very same thing a few days ago.
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Well symbiose with machine sounds good and all but to me there is more chance that human will gradually become moron depending on machine than anything else. To me, we are not using machine to make us better, we are making machine better so that we don't have to be better ourselves.
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Watching this video, I immediately thought of Advanced Chess, a relatively new form of chess, wherein each human player uses a computer chess program to help him explore the possible results of candidate moves. The human players, despite this computer assistance, are still fully in control of what moves their "team" (of one human and one computer) makes.
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Intelligence is vetted in the effectiveness of the decisions we make. If machines eventually make better decisions on average, then they'll be smarter. That's simple enough.
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Shit I'm still kinda stoked my buddy had a conversation with his damn phone. Talking to this Siri app about what happened in a football game and shit. Can't wait to see what they come out with in like 40 years.
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Interesting take on how the chip will one day become THE chip implanted in all of us when the machine will have complete control over every aspect of our lives. Isaacson apparently wants everyone to jump on the early (?!) bandwagon for the next 20 yrs. He seems oblivious to the totalitarian society that he is hastening to complete. His apparent trust in the hearts of humans with power & ambition is unbelievable.
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Everyone is looking at this the wrong way. You might be able to perfectly program a computer to mimic a human, but it is just that; a program. To truly get something to think, to truly think, you would need to look at the hardware, not just the software. Make something that physically functions like individual neurons and synapses so the computer can update and change how it thinks on the fly, like humans. Another thing we would need to do to make a computer think for itself would be to make something that mimics the chemicals in the brain, the chemicals that motivates and drives our thoughts and very being; What would be the point of a computer if it doesn't want to do anything and just 'doesn't feel like it' always?