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Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Turing, 1950, Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind)

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17 cards in “6 Contrary views on the main question” · whole deck

6 Contrary views on the main question

  1. What did Turing predict for about fifty years after 1950?
    That computers with a storage capacity of about \(10^9\) could be programmed to play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator would have no more than a 70% chance of a correct identification after five minutes of questioning, and that by the end of the century educated opinion would allow talk of machines thinking without contradiction.
  2. How did Turing defend stating conjectures openly?
    Scientists don’t proceed inexorably from established fact to established fact; conjectures are of great importance because they suggest useful lines of research, and no harm results as long as it is clear which statements are proved facts and which conjectures.
  3. List the nine objections Turing considered.
    (1) Theological, (2) “heads in the sand”, (3) mathematical, (4) from consciousness, (5) from various disabilities, (6) Lady Lovelace’s, (7) from continuity in the nervous system, (8) from informality of behaviour, (9) from extrasensory perception.
  4. How did Turing reply to the theological objection (thinking is a function of the immortal soul)?
    In its own terms: it restricts God’s omnipotence, since He could confer a soul on an elephant with a suitable brain, or on a machine; building such machines no more usurps His power than having children does. He added that theological arguments have often failed before, as against Copernicus.
  5. What is the “heads in the sand” objection, and Turing’s response?
    “The consequences of machines thinking would be too dreadful; let us hope they cannot.” It reflects a wish to believe Man is superior, strongest among intellectuals. Turing found it too insubstantial to refute: “Consolation would be more appropriate.”
  6. What is the mathematical objection to thinking machines?
    Results like Gödel’s theorem and Turing’s own (1937) show any given machine of this kind must answer some questions wrongly or not at all, e.g. “Will this machine ever answer ‘Yes’ to any question?” about a machine related to itself, a disability the human intellect is claimed not to share.
  7. How did Turing answer the mathematical objection?
    It is proved that any particular machine has limitations, but only asserted that humans have none. We often give wrong answers ourselves, and a triumph over one machine says nothing about all machines: there might be men cleverer than any given machine, but other machines cleverer again.
  8. State the argument from consciousness and Turing’s reply.
    (Jefferson) No machine equals a brain until it writes a sonnet because of thoughts and emotions felt, and knows it has. Taken to the extreme, the only way to know a machine (or a man) thinks is to be it: solipsism. Rather than accept that, we adopt the polite convention that everyone thinks, so critics would probably accept the test.
  9. What is a viva voce, and why did Turing bring it up?
    An oral examination used to find out whether someone really understands something or has learnt it “parrot fashion”, essentially the imitation game without player B. His sample viva about a sonnet (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”) shows the kind of sustained answers that would be hard to dismiss as “artificially signalling”.
  10. What are “arguments from various disabilities”, and how did Turing explain them?
    Claims that machines will never be able to do some X: be kind, have a sense of humour, fall in love, learn from experience, use words properly, do something really new… He saw them as unconscious scientific induction from the small, special-purpose machines people had seen, whose limitations mostly come from very small storage capacity.
  11. Distinguish errors of functioning from errors of conclusion.
    Errors of functioning come from mechanical or electrical faults; abstract machines can’t have them. Errors of conclusion arise when meaning is attached to the output and the machine outputs a falsehood, which nothing prevents. A machine playing the game would make deliberate arithmetic mistakes to avoid being unmasked by its accuracy.
  12. How can a machine be “the subject of its own thought”, according to Turing?
    In the sense that its operations can concern itself: helping to write its own programmes, predicting the effects of changes to its structure, or modifying its programmes by observing the results of its behaviour.
  13. What is Lady Lovelace’s objection?
    Of Babbage’s Analytical Engine: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
  14. How did Turing answer Lady Lovelace’s objection?
    The evidence available to her didn’t show the property, not that machines lack it; a universal machine could mimic any machine that has it. To the variant “a machine can never take us by surprise”: machines surprise him often, and assuming all consequences of known facts are seen at once is a fallacy.
  15. What is the argument from continuity in the nervous system, and the reply?
    The nervous system isn’t a discrete-state machine: small differences in an impulse can matter a lot. But under the game’s conditions the interrogator can’t exploit this: a digital computer imitating a continuous differential analyser asked for π could answer 3.12–3.16 with suitable probabilities and be indistinguishable.
  16. What is the argument from informality of behaviour, and Turing’s reply?
    No set of rules can cover every circumstance, so men can’t be machines. Turing separated rules of conduct (precepts one can follow, like stopping at red lights) from laws of behaviour (laws of nature applied to the body); we can never be sure there are no complete laws of behaviour, and even a small program can be impossible to predict from its replies.
  17. Why did Turing take the argument from extrasensory perception seriously, and how would he handle it?
    He believed the statistical evidence for telepathy was overwhelming, which would threaten the idea that bodies follow known physical laws. A telepathic human could beat a machine at guessing cards, so the test would need tightening: put the competitors in a “telepathy-proof room”.

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