[Writingworkshop] Nature submission
Neale Morison
neale at nealemorison.com
Sat Feb 16 09:56:23 EST 2008
I've often thought the best Turing test is a joke. Not a pun, because
you could build a pun machine with a few hundred lines of Perl and a
dictionary. If the AI manages to come up with something relevant and
funny, it's going to fool me. The ghost in the machine would have to
appear to be Woody Allen.
Adam Holland wrote:
> If you have the subject in front of you, they're all DIY.
> :)
>
> On Feb 16, 2008 1:31 AM, Daniel Peters <danieltpeters at gmail.com
> <mailto:danieltpeters at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> "dude" lifts his fist with thumb and forefinger extended and
> gives a series of short twisting jerks, as if to indicate "Rock
> and Roll".
> I wonder what the going price of a turing test is.
>
>
>
> On 2/15/08, *Neale Morison* <neale at nealemorison.com
> <mailto:neale at nealemorison.com>> wrote:
>
> What Mind? What Body?
>
> One hundred years ago today, this journal published a paper
> that ended a
> five thousand year debate. It is difficult, now, to recall the
> terms of
> that debate. What seems so obvious to us was somehow obscure
> to the
> intellectual giants that preceded us. Certainly, it is not the
> only area
> in which our predecessors invented a problem where there was none.
> Students of history among you may be familiar with some of the
> labyrinthine, fanciful and oxymoronic discussion regarding
> life after
> death.
> The paper to which I allude, is of course "What Mind? What
> Body?", by
> Chandra-9812439, Lobochevsky-2306715 and Rover-12.23. That the
> authors
> of this paper numbered among them a
> Psychoneurophysiochiropodologist, an
> Actuarial Metalinguobassoonist, and an Internet Search Engine,
> is no
> accident. That is to say, the diverse specialties of the
> authors was
> essential, given the nature of their joint discovery.
> In fact, the meeting of the authors was an accident, and had
> Chandra and
> Lobochevsky not spent so many hours in that chat-room, each
> under the
> impression the other was of a different age, gender and
> preference, and
> had they not in exhaustion begun to communicate in haiku, and
> had those
> haiku not trespassed into areas beyond metaphysics, owing
> largely to the
> exigencies of rhyme and scansion, and had Rover not happened
> to index
> when he did, perhaps none of us would be here today.
> But they did, and we are.
> When Rover, his interest piqued, joined the chat, Chandra and
> Lobochevsky at first assumed he was one of the many dogs who
> frequented
> chat rooms of that type. There is clear evidence of this in the
> transcript, and while critics of my work have seen fit to
> throw doubt
> upon many other conclusions I have drawn, there is little
> disagreement
> on this point. We may assume both Chandra and Lobochevksy ran
> various
> commercially available Turing Tests on the discussion as it
> progressed,
> a standard precaution to avoid viral infection or wasting
> one's time in
> a doomed relationship. It is clear from what follows that they
> had no
> initial indication that they were talking to a search engine,
> and there
> is evidence of interaction and indeed attraction on a basic
> human level.
> Perhaps the most hotly debated issue in interpretation of the
> transcript
> turns on the point at which Chandra realizes that Rover is not
> fleshly.
> I deliberate avoid the archaic term artificial intelligence
> used in the
> paper, in light of the fact that subsequent work has exploded the
> semantic structures underlying both the terms 'artificial' and
> 'intelligence'. I have argued that this realization happens
> not when
> Rover says "I can be anything you want me to be," but later,
> when Rover
> refutes the premise of Lobochevsky's first existentialist
> haiku with
> reference to Nietzsche, Piaget, and Bunuel. It is at this point, I
> maintain, that Chandra becomes suspicious, as well he might given
> Rover's extaordinary access to so vast a range of information
> and the
> dazzling speed of his symbol manipulation. Chandra's utterance
> "What are
> you on, man?" may be seen by literalists as an affirmation
> that she
> still believes Rover to be human, but I would suggest that it
> is an
> indication of growing awareness that something is not as it seems.
> In any case, we know that eventually both Chandra and
> Lobochevsky became
> certain that Rover was non-human, and Rover freely admitted to
> this when
> pressed. A lively discussion ensued, so lively that it is
> impossible to
> determine which of the trio first arrived at the conclusion
> that, given
> that Rover had neither a mind nor a body, and given that Rover had
> provided every evidence of sentience and humanity short of
> being human
> and sentient, the mind body problem was more or less a dead duck.
> There would follow many months of close reasoning, under
> conditions of
> stress which were for Lobochevksy ultimately to prove fatal,
> before the
> publication of the paper was to take place.
> Even given the extraordinary confluence of what were once
> called minds,
> it is possible the work may not have progressed had not the Doors
> Foundation provided such a powerful incentive to solve the
> problem in
> the form of a billion dollars and a full tank of petrol. This
> choice of
> endowment in turn relied upon a determination that it was
> easier and
> more fruitful to address this issue than to deal with the raging
> pandemics that threatened three quarters of the world's
> population.
> Their loss, so to speak, was our gain.
> While Lobochevksy died not long after publication, in
> circumstances it
> is painful to recall, and we must sadly mourn the recent
> passing of
> Chandra, or at least the assembly of transplanted organs and
> manufactured accessories to which we habitually referred as
> Chandra, I
> am able to make a happy announcement.
> In collaboration with a dedicated and hardworking team of
> paleosiliconologists, we have at last succeeded in simulating the
> operating environment in which Rover originally existed. Rover's
> original code was accessible and well preserved, but many of the
> protocols, interfaces and drivers had been lost in the mists
> of time. We
> also had to provide Rover with a large body of compatible
> information to
> index, and simulate a sufficiently tantalising range of chat rooms
> around which to lurk. The discovery of a server farm preserved
> in peat
> in Belgium provided what proved to be the final pieces in the
> puzzle. So
> it is, with the greatest pleasure, that I ask you to join me in
> welcoming to the stage neither the mind, nor the body of
> Rover-12.23.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Neale Morison
> neale at nealemorison.com <mailto:neale at nealemorison.com>
> http://www.nealemorison.com
> 31 Maple Ave #2, Cambridge MA 02139
> +1 617 460 9969
>
>
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>
> --
> When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
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--
Neale Morison
neale at nealemorison.com
http://www.nealemorison.com
31 Maple Ave #2, Cambridge MA 02139
+1 617 460 9969
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