Re: Turing Test is overrated?

I would say that the rescue robot, or the combat robot you describe
would not be intelligent, because it would not be straighforward to
adapt either intelligence to the task of the other.
On the other hand, for a machine to reliably carry on long term
conversations, it would need to understand points of strategy, some
basic military history and concepts, as well as the fact that a climber
will likely fall if they die, but can be stopped from falling if they
can grab a rope.
Conversation is something that requires broad intelligence,
adaptability, and an awareness of subtlety. If you can talk to an
intelligence, you can teach it to do other work, if you can't then you
have to redesign it for each task.

If I were running a Turing Test, it would last for months, and require
the parties and judges to collaborate on some project of their
choosing.


James Andrix



ilya2@xxxxxxx wrote:
No dolphin could ever pass Turing Test. Yet no one who spent some time
around dolphins will deny they are intelligent. For that matter a lot
of *humans* will not pass Turing Test, especially if they are from a
different cultural background than the person testing them. I do not
know what Alan Turing was thinking, but his test is enormously
restrictive.

Think of a robot (and I am fully aware that such robot is beyond
current capabilities) designed for mountain rescue. It has to navigate
very hazardous terrain, locate injured and possibly delirious people,
evaluate the nature of injuries, supply first aid, secure a portable
shelter on very non-flat ground and possibly in gale-force wind, and do
many other things I had not thought of. Such robot would have to have
cognitive functions which would make it intelligent by any reasonable
definition. Yet it has absolutely no need to *talk*, except to reassure
victims - and that can be done easily with ELIZA-type canned phrases.
(All communications with other rescue units/personnel should be done by
high speed electronic file transfer, not through slow and imprecise
human speech.) Such robot will fare worse at Turing Test than your
average parrot.

One practical application which has both the most use for AI and the
most dollars behind it is military. Yet how much intelligence does a
fully autonomous combat machine (call it Ralph) really need? Ralph has
to react to external stimuli -- something almost any animal can do. It
has to make tactical decisions -- something almost any predator can do.
And it has to learn from experience -- something almost any mammal can
do. Realistically, Ralph needs not be more intelligent than a cat.

Ralph should have language-recognition capabilities, because humans
convey information best by talking, but any speech on its part will be
superfluous. Given the level of technology required, all friendly
humans are likely to have head-up displays or some other visual
interface, and Ralph will convey tactical information that way. Humans
can absorb visual data MUCH faster than audial, which is one of the
reasons talking computers never really took off. And that's another
problem with Turing Test -- computer which talk like people are not
very *useful*. I do not want an AI which can discuss implications of
overfishing in the Gulf of Maine -- I want one which can put Gulf of
Maine onto a multimedia graph, and give ecology time-projections based
on various fishing policies. Something no human can do, at least not in
real time.

I once heard definition of AI as "getting computers to do things that
people do better [than people]". Even if it is achievable (which I am
not at all sure), I'd be much more interested in artificial
intelligence which is fundamentally *different* from human intelligence
-- as different as a dolphin's, or more. An AI which could perceive
problems the way no human ever could *would* be a breakthrough of
unimaginable (literally!) magnitude -- even if it remained clueless
about some things obvious to humans.

.