Monday, June 9, 2014

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On the "Passing of the Turing Test" and the related Emotional and Social-Ranking-Authorities nonsenses

Regarding the recent news and the wrong tone, interpretation, focus:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/18/turing-test-reading-opinions-contributors-artificial-intelligence-09-warwick.html
http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/A-Computer-Has-Reportedly-Passed-The-Turing-Test-5537703.php
http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/18/turing-test-reading-opinions-contributors-artificial-intelligence-09-warwick.html
http://longbets.org/1/  (notice the "emotions" and how they talk about them as something "mystical", while they are the dumbest the most obvious and not mystical)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10884839/Computer-passes-Turing-Test-for-the-first-time-after-convincing-users-it-is-human.html


See  a commentary of mine  (in the context of AGI list) or below:
See Also Ben Goertzel's comments in H+: http://hplusmagazine.com/2014/06/09/what-does-chatbot-eugene-goostmans-success-on-the-turing-test-mean/


Published also in the AGIRI list:


Todor Arnaudov's comment on the reported "passing" of the Turing test

Turing test is superficial, based on wrong "social" settings, and somewhat a "lottery".
It's rather "political" than epistemological/gnoseological/cognitive and has wrong hyporcitic goals to fool somebody and to seek for acknowledgment or mercy from an impersonated authority, having some social ranking and perhaps physical power that is higher, and to whom is given the right to decide whether the "candidate" is "elligible" to be given a particular "order/medal/title", that is - particular political rights, social ranking, social status.
This is societal nonsense, a reflection of what most people care about - social ranking, social ranking and at last - social ranking. Well, also about "emotions" -  another among the structurally dumbest things, which is present in all kinds of living beings all the time, and even in the youngest ones, and is expressed in a few bits, thus it is the most platitudinous/banal and obvious.
That includes the high-ranked scholars who perhaps don't have a clue about the analysis above, but as high-ranked individuals usually are, firstly, inclined towards social hierarchy nonsenses, and later on - additionally trained, as ones who are at the high ranks - they use to fight to keep the status quo which is in their favour.

The above holds for humans vs AGI in general. The humans, even the dumbest ones, put their head under the common hat of "humans" or "human race", and they have to declare something. "Humans are creative" or "intelligent" - even though that they as individuals are not, and are banal and mediocre like the "emotions", which are obvious, a solved problem in any well written literary work, dramatic piece, movie script etc.

In two words: Political bullshits, sophistry and mass-deluding nonsenses.

Even without deeper analysis, the verbs in the gushy articles regarding the Turing test are silly by themselves:

*  "convincing judges":  what is it, rhetorics? a trial? Or sophistry, lie, delusion?*  "fooling users that it was a human"  - lying, delusion

Indeed, that phenomenon is a reflection of the sick values of society. In the concept of "social intelligence", the hypocrisy, the ability to delude, to manipulate, to lie and to exploit others is of high value, and the fact that the society pretends that it "doesn't like hypocrisy", that "liying is wrong" is a part of the sick hypocritical nature of humans, especially the ones who are higher in the hierarchy.

(And humans believe they are higher than animals, machines etc., thus they have "their rights to decide" - instead of objective and obvious measures which do not require impersonated judges.)


True AGI is obvious

That is what has to be achieved - results that are obvious. Not ones that requre a "qualified" "judge" and it should be so from the beginning.

It's trivial to recognize a machine if it really is Versatile Limitless Self-Improver/AGI, and it doesn't lie and is not artificially slowed down and if it is sincere, self-aware [knows about itself, trully - a system that pretends that is was 13-year old boy, 15-year old... dog etc. is not self-aware, unless if it knew that it was pretending and was playing].

Also if it's too slow, too smart, too quick, too deep etc. it will be "different", compared to a human.

I myself am working on a machine that is to FAIL this silly test without taking it.
I guess I will fail it myself as a "non-human" - depends on... the randomness of the jury and how convinced they were of the possibility that a human who would compose such long and complex sentences, if she wished, would be selected to participate in such a test. 

The exact level of intelligence (compared to particular person/s, age, education, social group etc.) in fine-grained terms and fine-grained measures in each particular domain, and in all combined should be rather obvious from the performance of the system without any artificial settings, as mentioned in 0.1.1.266 and later - everything is "a test of intelligence"  should be obvious directly, especially as "intelligence" is a vague term "without concensus on it", aggregating all kinds of perception, prediction, planning, decision making, search, goal-seeking behavior, reinforcement learning capabilities, generalization and specification, increase of the resolution of perception and causation etc. etc.

A test is needed when it is not obvious, when it's somewhat brittle, unknown, BUT some authority has to "approve" it, to "allow it", a pretentious pedantry like the texts in the patents or the following joke:

We, the jury, declare, that the applicant #124353485943, after passing the Turing test with 33.467%, is the first artificial intelligence! Now according to the deputy of ministers of the Royal society of scientific council of the international organization of ABCD, that has leading scholars from the top universities and research groups in the field, we allow that this machine can be called "artificial intelligence" and we proclaim to call this date the birth od the true artificial intelligence. Amen!
By the way, that reminds me of the "birth" of the AI, as it was solemnly proclaimed to be the Dartmouth conference in 1956 - because some high ranked individuals from high-ranked Universities gathered and decided "this is the new science".


See:
See 0.1.1.203: "Man and Thinking Machine (...) " T.A.,  http://razumir.twenkid.com/kakvomu_notes.html#203 (2001, Bg)

See 0.1.1.266: "Faults in Turing Test and Lovelace Test ..." T.A http://razumir.twenkid.com/kakvomu_notes.html#266   - "http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/search?q=Lovelace (2007, En)

Regarding the sick,and ill defined concept of the society for "intelligence"
I suggest my latest major super multi-inter disciplinary sociological-philosophical-
artistic-literary-satirical-many others-and-some specifically about AGI-and consciousness- work "What a man needs? Part I - Nice guys finish last!", from the first issue of the new e-zine called Razumir (however in this issue - in Bulgarian):    http://razumir.twenkid.com/

It's a complete book of several hundred pages, has many independent and interacting "processes" and many threads of thought. One of the threads that is related to the Turing test besides that superficial social-ranking business is another one from that yard - the subordination and the obedience to impersonated beings are seen by society (the higher ranked and the slaves) as "intelligence". 
That's one major reason why humans believe that dogs are "intelligent" (where more appropriate words are also  obedient to the master, willing to subordinate/please, willing to seek for approval for their actions, dependent on the master, slavish...). "Intelligence" here is a hypocritical term, similar to the hyporcitical pretended prohibition of lying as a "sin" or "immoral", where the higher in society a person grows, the more he lies/deludes/manipulates/is hypocritic.
Humans use to hate or ignore the cognitively more intelligent ones - except if the latter had clearly higher social ranking, were your firends/somehow you identify and take his positive qualities as your own.

The higher ranked ones are "smarter" because of their ranking - they are "qualified". The clueless have nothing but to cite the "qualified", since the former cannot discriminate by their own thinking the nonsense and adopt the authority.

Dogs are complimented as intelligent only because they are servants and are actually dumb enough. Here goes also humans' intrinsic love of slavery - fixated in the culture of thinking machines from the beginning - Chapek's robots and Asimov's positronic slaves with their naive inborn "morality" created to please slave-owners.

According to society (and the not very cognitively/epistemologically intelligent ones), your master (or God, superior, boss) should decide even about your intrinsic qualities - because you yourself can't know - most people do not know. Thus everything is converted into "social ranking" and "rights", the only intelligible or acceptable measures for the majority of people. A monkey/primate thing...

And there we are back to the Turing test only a glorious jury, ellected by he Royal Committee of the Lord of Old-Willinshere North Dillignshane, Knight of the Lord of the... Bullshit - should decide whether a machine "has intelligence", because it passes Turing test - the value of which is approved because "Turing was one of the pioneers of the new field, contributor of.. amazing, extraordinary.":

- missing that that's the first test, one of the pioneers... - Turing himself may have denied it if he could live longer; that was what first came to his mind, he didn't have time to elaborate it, the noble society where he lived took it away

- the test is perhaps biased by the society where he lived with its particular manner of social ranking relations/academic "approval" style

- missing the nonsenses of it (which come out naked if one understands it)

The fixation of the first inarticulate and naive test as a standard, by the way, is another illustration of the "authority-obeying-citation" sickness in society, including the speculative sciences - philosophy was in that role some time ago.

Talking and exaggerating bombast nonsenses, without understanding that they are superficial or confused and avoiding questioning them, because "they were obvious"; actually - because they were approved by the unquestionable authority.
In sensory-motor generalization terms that is - lacking the facculty of judgement - as my "brother in mind" and his predecessor called the capability to connect abstract and concrete (regarding the terms of the translators in English).

That nonsense has deeply poisened the world - Europe was in the darkness of partial or complete mental retardation and madness for some 1000-2000 years due to such blind wrong undoubted "truths" coming from power-seeking "socially intelligent" social-hierarchy-climbing religious ideologists and rulers, whose concepts of "intelligence" was "social intelligence", master-slave relations; that is: political, social-hierarchy-related and "emotional", instead of epistemological and cognitive - "rational", of the Reason, related to "the faculty of judgment", "Objective" (in terms of as translated in English in the works of Kant and Schopenhauer).

* Someone may suggest "ethical" among "political" in the last sentence - not really, because the cognitive intelligence includes also ethics. Epistemological philosophy in its best is often  connected to Pantheism or is Atheistic, in the sense that "Theistic" religious, the monotheistic, are related to some unquestionable impersonated ruler and the slave should obey the master and has no right to ask questions - or he will be punished by "God" - the ones who usurped the authority, the power, the rights.

My philosophical brother of mind Arthur Schopenhauer has elaborated on this topic before myself, Nietsche has written on that as well.

Ethics as well can be primitive and superficial or deep and elaborate. Simple "emotions" and social-ranking relations of subordination because somebody owns a higher position - with no questions why it has a higher position and should  he -  require less sophisticated cognition than the critical version. Recognition of the ranking is enough - such as a crown of a king, different clothes, different colours, bigger size; backed up with some sort of application of force at a given point in time - punishment and reward.

Dogs and the dumbest people are clever enough to "understand" such kind of "ethics", while the individuals with the highest cognitive/epistemological intelligence often have "low" intelligence in this vicious and corrupted sense - even though they clearly demonstrate that the nonsense of society is far more clear to their minds, they can predict behavior and they know why things are as they are and thoroughly understand the society and humans. However they deny to obey, which is the major dog-like way to express "intelligence" in such silly ethical (political) systems.

=== Todor "Tosh" Arnaudov ===

.... Author of the world's first University courses in AGI  (2010, 2011)http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com/2010/04/universal-artificial-intelligence.html
... Todor Arnaudov's Researchers Blog: http://artificial-mind.blogspot.com
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