Blog 12: AI

I do not believe the Turing Test is a good test for intelligence at all. First of all, I don't even believe intelligence to be an attribute of non-living objects. That being said, testing an object for intelligence is silly in my opinion. You could say that the Turing Test is a good test for the compitence of a program which is created by man and is therefore the intelligence of man. Sure we can be tricked by the Turing Test, but only to a certain point. Just because I might open spam mail, doesn't mean that I have completely been tricked by a computer. Humans have the intelligence to open the mail and immediately recognize that it is indeed spam. To say that a computer or a program has intelligence is to completely ignore the human intelligence behind the creation. Human language is so complex and operates on levels completely beyond the explaination or understanding that we have of it. Therefore, to accurately translate that into a program is impossible. Sure, we can get close, but it is nothing more than a simulation. This is easy to oncover after talking with a chatbot for more than a few minutes. And the BBC article makes a good point. Perhaps the integration of technology in our lives has detracted from human ability to communicate and therefore it is us failing the Turing Test and not the computers passing it. While a computer may have superhuman memory, it can not comprehend sarcasm, relate personality to text, or even have its own original thoughts. If the basis of intelligence is though, computers have none. All they do is compile data that has been programed into them. Obviously a computer doesn't have emotions. I do not believe there is any way to test the intelligence of a computer, as I do not believe computers to be intelligence. If a computer could give me advice, empathize with emotions, and express opinions, then maybe we could discuss its intelligence, but until that day a computer is nothing more than a man made tool to store and retrieve data.