Minds and Machines: Assignment 1

Assignment 1
Due Thursday, January 31st

Remember:

You must do one of the first 3 assignments.
No late papers
Use your own words—no quotations or paraphrases

Allocate space to your responses in proportion to what you find interesting. Answer all of the questions in order.

In a few sentences, say what you think of the Turing Test as a practical way of assessing whether a machine can think.

Suppose that the 21st Century brings genuinely intelligent machines. Suppose that a judge who is also an expert on intelligent machines can discriminate between a genuinely intelligent machine and a human on the basis of her knowledge of how the currently available machines are programmed. Does Turing make any commitment regarding such a possibility? What should he say given his other commitments?

In questions A, B, C and D, your task is to evaluate the four objections that follow, conceiving of the Turing Test NOT as a practical way of assessing whether a machine can think, but as an account of what thinking is, i.e., an account such that something thinks « it would pass the test. Say whether the objection is relevant to the '->' part of the claim or to the '<-' part of the claim.

An intelligent machine might believe that were it to pass the Turing Test, people would take it apart to see how it worked. So it might intentionally fail.
Recall that 5 of the 10 judges in the First Turing Test thought that a version of Weizenbaum's program was human. So naive humans might be said to be too gullible for Turing Test purposes. Suppose the government decided to make Weizenbaum's ELIZA program vastly larger by adding more and more canned responses and developing hardware to get the machine to deliver the canned responses quickly. The resulting SUPERELIZA program, still a bag of tricks-- that is, responses whose every detail was thought of by the programmers--might be thought to be intelligent even by judges who are wise to the ELIZA tricks.
An intelligent cave-person might be very good at telling men from women in the imitation game, but nonetheless hopeless at telling men from machines because of lack of familiarity with technology. With such a judge, unintelligent machines--even simple record players--may consistently pass the Turing Test. Further, it will do no good to specify that the judge be selected randomly, for in a cave-society (where everyone is unfamiliar with technology) unintelligent machines may consistently pass, and thus will be intelligent, relative to that society, according to the Turing Test conception of intelligence. Of course, an unintelligent machine such as a record player will be incapable of the genuine thinking that the cave people manage easily, e.g., figuring out where to find food, understanding why the fire went out, and the like. So the machine won't be genuinely intelligent, even by the standards of that society.
The last two objections depend on the possibililty that the judge may lack the abilities necessary to discriminate intelligent machines from unintelligent ones. Is there some way of specifying the nature of the judge so as to avoid such problems?
We could replace the Turing Test with a very hard behavioral task, e.g. discriminating people from machines. If a machine does so reliably, that logically entails that it thinks, so a version of the Turing Test works as a conceptually or logically sufficient condition of thought.