Ask an Artificial Intelligentsia

[ignoramus]

Mate, that's why you need to see ex machina. It takes it to the next level.
I was getting a hard on for a robot!

[I_am_not_mafia]

Actually, I meant indistinguishable in the sense of interactions (body aside), such as an artificial intelligence able to pass the Turing test 100% of the time.  For instance, could I sit down at my monitor and have a conversation about, say, Milton, and be unable to tell if I were speaking with a flesh-and-blood or an A.I?

It is plausible to do that if you are prepared to use trickery but it won't ever understand what you are saying.

Parry was a chatterbot developed in the 70's that could fool psychiatrists because it pretended to be a paranoid schizophrenic. The reason this worked was because whatever you talked about it would bring the subject back to certain key topics it wanted to talk about. The only time the Turing test has been passed is by massively constricting the range of possible conversation. Parry worked like Eliza by matching key words and given certain rules about what to do when it did not recognise the input.

But can it be achieved in the future where we can talk about anything? Not in a way where the computer actually understands you.

We don't need Artificial Intelligence to see why this won't work. Here's a gruesome thought experiment for you.

Take a small baby just fresh out of the womb and stick it in a black box for the rest of its life with no human contact, hooked up to feeding and waste disposal tubes, unable to move but for example shown the contents of the Internet. Let's try teaching it using an automated program whereby electrodes in its brain deliver pleasure and pain signals. No matter how long you waited, that human would still not actually understand what is was being asked or even what it was itself. This is because it has not led a human life. It's like trying to describe what red is to someone who was born blind. But it could learn certain responses to given stimuli based on how it had been taught.

That's the most that you can achieve with an AI that does not have a body.

---

Hi matey.
Have you seen "Ex Machina"
Very interesting movie...

What is "blue book"?

I haven't seen Ex Machina yet unfortunately.

As for blue book, according to google it is "the UK's largest collection of bathroom and washroom products for Specifiers, Contractors and Installers"


Typing in "blue book artificial intelligence" into google was more helpful though.

Although an A.I. needs to be physically situated into order to truly understand things, it's actually quite amazing what you can get away with trickery. 95% of Artificial Intelligence is trickery. Although by the same token, this is why Artificial Intelligence never scales well. So you can write a chatterbot to emulate a paranoid schizophrenic but the amount of work required exponentially increases as it becomes more generally responsive.

The contents of the world wide web has been created by (more or less) intelligent beings. Language is full of constants. If it wasn't we wouldn't understand each other. This is why we have grammar, dictionaries and thesaurusi. For example, if you translated an idiom literally it would be nonsensical (what do you mean household pets are falling from the sky??). But when we say it is raining cats and dogs we know that the listener will understand that it means that it's raining hard.

Sometimes this doesn't work out very well though.

When I was living in Germany a colleague would come by at 12pm everyday saying Mahlzeit (basically a greeting that's said at the start of lunch). I often used this opportunity to learn a sentence in German and say it to him in reply. One day I decided that as he walked into my office before he could say anything I would exclaim loudly in German "It's not my fault you're doing it wrong". I put that into google translate and the German translation was rather wrong. I then figured out what it was saying by putting it back through google translate. It had translated "It's not my fault you are doing it wrong" to "It's not my fault you are just with premature ejaculation."

Oddly enough it gave the correct translation if I put a full stop (period) at the end. I reported it to google and they corrected it but I can only assume that servers had analysed web pages where the most common variant of that English sentence was used in discussions of premature ejaculation.