Intelligence – Human or Computer
Alan Turing was a mathematician. It is his name on the test of artificial intelligence: the “Turing Test”. The basic question is whether machine can simulate human intelligence:
“…In the ‘Turing test’ a machine seeks to fool judges into believing that it could be human. The test is performed by conducting a text-based conversation on any subject. If the computer’s responses are indistinguishable from those of a human, it has passed the Turing test and can be said to be ‘thinking’.”
link: ‘Intelligent’ computers put to the test’
There are many philosophical and ethical questions associated with the issue of human intelligence versus artificial intelligence. The first step remains that the machines have to do is fool some humans.
Catherine Forsythe
One Comment
James C. Dunavant
October 5th, 2008
at 1:18pm
The difficulty in decidiing whether a computer (call it a machine) is conscious is in deciding what consciousness is. To begin with are we talking about self-awareness, or the ability to respond to internal and external stimuli?
In the first case, I don’t think current computers are self-aware, tho in my 20+ years experience as a computer programmer I sometimes wondered when the
machine was fighting me over in whatever program I was writing. This, of course, was just an illusion–an emotional reaction on my part, and in the end I won.
In the second case, yes, computers are conscious. How else would they know what key was pressed or the details of other input devices? How do you know when you hit your thumb with a hammer and it hurts? Is not your brain a computer of sorts?
Whatever the case, we still don’t know what consciousness truly is. But I believe that consciousness is a property of the universe. How else could it exist. But what is its exact nature? For consciouness to exist in a single entity, be it human or machanical/electronic, all that is required is a sufficiently
complex “brain” (note the quotes) that can individualize itself from the universe.
Yet I still cannot “prove” the the people around me are conscious. I believe they are because I am conscious (so I believe), and a very similar machine.
And, yes, we are machines. So what is to prevent other “types” of machines to be “conscious” and one day soon, self-aware? I believe it will happen given enough time. It may have already happened elsewhere in the universe.
// Jim
http://members.atlantic.net/~jcd/