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Rethinking The Turing Test
How Can I Help You? In the 2013 film, Elysium, critical jobs have been outsourced to intractible, inadequate machines, like this automated customer service rep. Image Courtesy of Elysium: The Art of the Film © 2013 Tristar Pictures At a competition in June, a chatbot named Eugene duped a group of human judges into believing it was a Ukrainian teenager. The judges hailed it as the first time a machine passed the Turing Test—that hallowed measure of artificial intelligence (AI) proposed by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950.
Eugene’s victory was short-lived. Within days, AI researchers had dismissed the chatbot’s achievement as a collection of canned responses. Then they took the Turing Test itself to task. Conceived of as a kind of existential parlor game, the test asks a human and a machine to respond to questions from remote interrogators. A computer mistaken for a person would prove that it had developed the capacity to mimic our own thought processes.
That all sounds good enough, but “people are easy to deceive,” says Ernie Davis, a computer scientist at New York University. “We’re used to the safe assumption that whoever is talking to us is actually an intelligent person.” So human officiants will likely give the computer the benefit of the doubt. Additionally, chatbots often mask their lack of reasoning by coming across as merely scatterbrained. For example, futurist Ray Kurzweil once asked Eugene, “If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more, how many marbles are in the bowl now?” “Not too many,” wrote Eugene. “I can’t tell you the exact number; I forgot it. If I’m not mistaken, you still didn’t tell me where you live.”
“We’re used to the safe assumption that whoever is talking to us is actually an intelligent person.”
In that way, the Turing Test doesn’t foster the development of machines with adaptive, human-level smarts. Instead, it exposes our own gullibility, and spawns programs whose greatest innovation is the tactical use of snarky non-sequiturs and manipulative charm.
The harsh criticism of AI’s most famous benchmark comes at a moment when interest and investment in the field are spiking. Google recently acquired AI firm DeepMind for $400 million, and IBM is investing $1 billion in its Watson system, the former Jeopardy! winner that’s now unraveling the genetics of brain cancer. Even the late Alan Turing is getting the Hollywood treatment this fall, as the subject of the biopic The Imitation Game. Some might say the field of AI doesn’t need the Turing Test anymore. We should just let machines grow smarter on their own inhuman terms.
That would be a mistake. The genius of the Turing Test is that it captured the public imagination and drove innovation. So why not build a new one better suited to the task of proving true artificial intelligence. “Maybe rather than looking at one big hurdle, we should try to understand how to make a bunch of small steps that lead us along the path to something useful,” says Noah Goodman, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University. Machines should have to tackle a range of tasks that emphasize nimble, on-the-spot thinking. Can it describe a video after seeing it for the first time, respond to direct questions with direct answers, and recognize nuances in language? Far more than a gimmick, such a system would finally demonstrate, in Turing’s words, “a machine that thinks.” Eugene was nowhere close.
This article originally appeared in the October 2014 issue of Popular Science.
Source: http://www.popsci.com/article/science/rethinking-turing-test?dom=PSC&loc=recent&lnk=7&con=rethinking-the-turing-test
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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