Artificial Intelligence And The Turing Test

Artificial Intelligence is the taking over of machines to do tasks that would normally require a human to do. The idea of artificial intelligence has been around for years, appearing in movies and television shows to show what the future might bring. Artificial intelligence is becoming closer to a reality and now society must question if it should have a role in society. Artificial intelligence has many flaws at the moment making it impractical for use until society can address the issues facing it like the loss of jobs and how to control the use of AI.

Turing, a physicalist, believed that artificial intelligence could be achieved in the future. Turing argued that the mind was merely due to the physical aspects of the brain and so a machine could one day be created that has a mind of its own, i.e. artificial intelligence. He created a test called the Turing Test to determine whether a machine has artificial intelligence. In the Turing Test, an interrogator asks two subjects a series of questions. One of the subjects is a person, the other is the computer. The goal is for the person to imitate a computer and the computer to imitate the person. If the interrogator is fooled into thinking that the computer is the human then the computer, according to Turing, is concluded to have the ability to think and thus, have a mind. Turing argued that machines passing the Turing Test were sufficient for ascribing thought.

According to the creators of the experiment, proponents of strong artificial intelligence - those who claim that adequate computer programs can understand natural language or possess other properties of the human mind, not simply simulate them - must admit that either the room understands the Chinese language, or passing the Turing test is not enough proof of intelligence. For the creators of the experiment none of the components of the experiment includes Chinese, and therefore, even if the set of components exceeds the test, the test does not confirm that the person actually understands Chinese, since as we know Searle does not know that language.

Through the use of his famous Chinese room scenario, John R. Searle tries to prove there is no way artificial intelligence can exist. This means that machines do not posses minds.

I will support this thesis by taking a few of the objections that were argued against the mindedness of a computer in Turing’s paper, and explaining how they can be modified to allow passing of the test

In today’s society, artificial intelligence appears a daunting and frightening area, however this idea was embraced by Turing. He was a pioneer of imitation, that is, the imitation of the human mind in a machine. The perspectives of Turing with regards to artificial intelligence were new and original, nobody had questioned whether or not a machine can think or likened one to the human mind. It is important to remember that artificial intelligence is only an attempt at recreating the human machine, as Turing put it, which is the mind. In 1942, Turing was quoted saying: “We do not wish to penalise the machine for its inability to shine in beauty competitions, nor to penalise a man for losing in a race against an aeroplane” which demonstrates one of Turing’s key perspectives. Man and machine are going to be different, an attempt at copying the human mind, will not yield a human, but a machine, reinforcing the fact that artificial intelligence is only an attempt to imitate the mind. A paper, written by Turing, outlines an “imitation test,” a test which contrasts the power of the human mind to that of a machine. This test was developed by Turing in order to help the public grasp the concept of an artificial intelligence: it precedes as follows. A participant is asked to take part in two conversations, one of which is with a machine, the other with a human. Now imagine if the participant was unable to decide which was the machine and which was human. Turing

Nonetheless, French (2012) argues that the time has come to re-examine the abandonment of the idea that a machine programmed could pass the Turing test with unconditional accomplishments. Namely, new discoveries in intellectual cognitive science that have demonstrated that human intelligence is fundamentally linked to the embodied experience suggest that computers cannot imitate human intelligence in those aspects in which it is momentously dependent of the sensory experience of the world. Due to these discoveries, scientists abandoned the idea that computers would be able to fully emulate human behavior. However, as French (2012) suggests advances in information technology have brought about software that can collect and retrieve virtually all data that is presented about human experience on the internet. He cites a recent experiment in which a home camera system filmed the first 2 years of one baby’s life the entire time (French 2012). The data used to teach the computer about those aspects of human cognition as well thus facilitating it effusively to pass the Turing test. What remains is to ask whether a computer that could do that is in any imperative aspect different from a human (French 2012). French (2012) seems to be suggesting that passing this full version of Turing test

To determine if a machine possesses intelligence, it is first necessary to determine what qualifies as “intelligent behavior,” and secondly, an unbiased method for recognizing intelligent behavior is needed. Besides being able to possess some sort of knowledge, a program that claims to be “intelligent” must be able to reason (Bethell). The program must be able, much like humans, to act on present situations with knowledge gained from prior experience and with a future-oriented outlook (LaChat). Given a definition of intelligence, Alan Turing suggested a test to ascertain if a machine was “intelligent.” In the test, an

“Can a machine made by intelligent minds have an intelligent mind of its own?” This was the question that was being asked in the 1950s. A man by the name of Alan Turing decided to venture out and analyze this question for himself by coming up with a thought experiment in which he called the imitation game. This is a game that involves three players. One of each gender and one who plays the judge to determine the gender of players A and B. A’s job is to try and trick C-the judge-into guessing the wrong gender. If C guess incorrectly, then A passes wins the game, or passes the Turing Test. Now, if we were to imagine a machine to replace A’s position in the game and now the judge has to figure out who is human and who is machine. If the machine

Alan Turing put this argument forward in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. His opening pages of the paper begin with the words; "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?” (Alan Turing 1950). My main argument to this is that a computer does not have the ability to think, primarily because it was created rather than ‘born and raised’.

In attempting to answer the question of whether machines are able to think, Turing redesigns the question around the notion of machines’ effectiveness at mimicking human cognition. Turing proposes to gauge such effectiveness by a variation of an ‘imitation game,’ where a man and a woman are concealed from an interrogator who makes

The Turing test is a method conceived by Allan Turing to determine whether a mind is conscious. Supposing we create a machine that has been programmed to responds in the exact way that humans do. In the Turing test, both the machine and a human are asked the same questions. A person listening to their answers without knowing which of them was responding each time has to discern which answers are given by the machine. His premise is that if the answers of the machine and the human are indistinguishable, there would be no difference between machine and human in terms of consciousness.

On his essay “Can machines think?” Alan Turing, a great mathematician, and creator of the Turing Test presents us with the initial concept of what is now considered artificial intelligence. He states that eventually, as time progresses, machines will be able to think like humans. But, can a machine really think like a human? Can a machine even think on its own, or it is just based on human science and engineering to make computer systems perform tasks that require intelligence when done by humans?

I am going to argue that Searle is correct to claim that digital computers are not capable of genuine understanding. I believe computers are told what to do without any genuine understanding of what the computers are doing. It is impossible for a computer programmed machine to think.

Alan Turing was a famous British mathematician and computer scientist who was determined to prove that machines at some point (possibly sometime in the future) would be able to surpass humans in intelligence levels. In order to prove this true, he created what became to be known as, “The Turing Test.” This test was basically to see if a computer could trick a person into believing that it was human. It would be asked a series of questions, which would be compared to responses of the human. It was designed so that one could judge the intelligence level of the computers’ responses. Turing believed that if a human could not tell the difference between another human and a computer, then it served as proof that a computer is equally intelligent as a human. Due to a large