I don't really know this, but I suspect that writer Brian Christian isn't too concerned about Watson's thorough drubbing of Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy. Christian, who has dual degrees in computer science and philosophy with an MFA in Poetry, was a contestant in the Loebner Prize competition. This competition is based on Alan Turing's proposed experiment: several judges each pose questions, via computer terminal, to several pairs of unseen correspondents, one a human and the other a computer program, and attempt to discern which is which. The idea is to see if it is possible to construct a computer so sophisticated that it could actually be said to have a mind -- at least as far as any human could tell.
Christian writes about his experience in a marvelous article in the Atlantic: "Mind vs Machine". I'll not give away what happens, but Christian sees these tests, not so much as an ominous portent of the coming of a machine age, but as a way of helping us to see what real intelligence is, and what is unique about being human. He suggests that raw analytic ability may not be the key to the essence of humanity. As we can see from Watson, machines can out-perform us here. Having as memory is not the same as having a mind. (He quotes Salvador Dali: "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.”)
Christian sees that the essence of intelligence is the ability to interact. Here is his account of of a winning conversation between the judge and a human confederate:
Judge: Hey Bro, I’m from TO.Confederate: coolConfederate: leafs suckConfederate: ;-)Judge: I am just back from a sabbatical in the CS Dept. at U of T.Confederate: nice!Judge: I remember when they were a great team.Judge: That carbon date me, eh?Confederate: well, the habs were a great team once, too …Confederate: *sigh*Judge: YEH, THEY SUCK TOO.
As Christian says, the confederate and his judge "had just discovered that they were both Canadian. They let rip with abbreviations and nicknames and slang and local references. And then they started to talk about hockey." Could a computer ever be mindful enough to pick up on all the cues?
8 comments:
Great Article, loved how the article showed Christian preparing himself to be more human like.
While I think the turning test is a cool illustration of technology's march, I don't get why we want machines to act like humans other than novelty, challenge and narcissism. For instance, IBM and Nuance is turning Watson into a medical diagnostic machine, the machine would really suck if it got the sudden desire to play farmville.
But I guess the main point of the article is the imitation of humanity through machine gives us a better understanding of what it is to be human. I just don't buy the idea that to be human is unique, the brain is finite piece of organic machine that will be copied, nature got 3.5 billion years humans have only had only about 100 years. Check out the Brain Blue Project
I enjoyed the article also. As this article illustrates, what is unique about humans is that they will never stop creating better (re: more human) 'machines' to win the Turing Test and, at the same time, will never stop creating better ways to win the Turing Test themselves.
Yes, the article suggests that we actually need to work at being human. It all comes back -- as everything eventually does -- to Richard Feynman: “Dear Mrs. Chown, Ignore your son’s attempts to teach you physics. Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.”
Peter H. said, "…the brain is [a] finite piece of organic machine that will be copied."Because Peter H. and I have sometimes been at odds in this blog, I feel obligated to point out when we agree. (In fact, as science aficionados, we agree on practically everything.)
If you haven't read Catch 22, skip this next sentence: "Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret." Back at college, Fr. Hege (theology prof.) used to get quite animated whenever a student would mention 'the soul' as if it were a part of a human. He would rip open his cassock, pull out his undershirt in a feigned attempt to dig into his body, "Where's my soul?! Show me where my soul is?" he would yell. Later, at Carnegie Mellon, Nobel Prize winner Herb Simon would challenge any student to come up with something about a human that couldn't be done with software/hardware. As Peter, Snowden, Simon, and others point out, we are not magic, we are matter.
Now, I have to disagree with the first part of Pete's sentence…but not in the way he intended it…in order to tell a story. I was driving up to Prince Gallitzin with Renée and Michael, and Michael, in answer one of my common questions, was trying to think of one thing he had learned in school that day. (So far, I believe, 100% of the time this question goes unanswered.) Anyway, he was mentioning how interesting it is to catch a snowflake on your mitten and examine it. Renée wisely asked Michael, "Do you know that no two snowflakes are alike? Each is unique." Michael ponders this a second and says, "Well, if you think about it, every thing is unique."
Keep your eye on that boy.
Pete, I also wanted to respond to your comment about the brain being a machine that will someday be copied. I don't really know what the future holds, so I don't necessarily disagree with you. But I am a bit concerned that your argument encourages the intelligent design people. The "finite piece of organic machine" suggests design. And no doubt someone may argue that if one intelligence can design it, another intelligence can replicate it.
Its one thing to be an organic machine that conforms to some blueprint from which you can build the next one; its quite another thing to emerge from the murky depths of time and be buffeted about by chance for over a billion years. Replication may not be so easy.
Myk, I see your point, but its more semantics (instead of organic machine how about, "junk inside the cranium"). I don't waste much time as to whether my wording encourage or discourages crackpot ideas like intelligent design.
And to your point, no, science will not replicate "my" brain. As Jim pointed out we are all unique, spatial-temporally speaking but yes, Junk in the cranium does have a blueprint that we can copy, 90 billion non-neuron cells, 90 billion neurons and about 1 quadrillion synaptic connections (a very daunting task to replicate, like asking medieval people to build the Burj Khalifa ).
Also, your final line about evolution is incorrect, "buffeted about by chance for over a billion years" which intelligent designers use as a counterargument against evolution, 'The product of chance can't be a human brain'. Intelligent designers are right, evolution is not directed by chance (pace of evolution is directed somewhat by chance, catastrophic events). Instead, evolution "designs" life driven by probabilistic fitness (aka natural selection). So there is a designer per se, though definitely not intelligent, the designer is the laws governing nature.
Pete, I hope that you are not saying that given the laws of nature and of causation, that the universe we inhabit was inevitable and, indeed, is the only possible universe.
The corollary to this is that, if predictable, the universe is ultimately totally transparent to science.
Before Pete answers I would like to mitigate the risk of argument by saying that, although Pete has shown tendencies toward affirming that the universe is transparent to science, I think he would agree with Feynman, Einstein, Greene, and any other scientist who I have heard speak on the subject, that the answer to that question is not the important thing. They all would agree with Camus (Greene I'm liking more since I discovered he opens his latest book with a quote from Camus) that it is the pursuit that is important, not the final outcome, if any.
I know there are some who believe the pursuit is meaningless if you don't believe in a final outcome. We pray for them. But Pete, I believe at this time, is not one of them.
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