Computers Are Now Officially Conscious - The First Machine Has Passed The Turing Test

[stonehart]

Just a friendly reminder that nobody has ever implied that machines have now surpassed, nor are even equal to, human beings. Sorry, I've had problems before with people putting words into my mouth in this forum.

Wow chill out man that was not what my intention at all.. What I stated was a simple dear I say fact and taking a line of thought on the subject.

Machine intelligence is inevitable at this point no one here is going to argue that and as for a mile stone yes it is one indeed as far as the "Turing" test is concerned.

Hell I have seen so much change in the two lines of work I do that I would be a blind fool not to place money on the eventuality of machine intelligence equaling if not surpassing that of humans in the very near future.
My sound engineering work aside I also work in electronics and boy oh boy how that has changed since the 90's.
I remember when most PCB's had a few surface mount components and in most cases they were not all that small, but now! hell I need a microscope to see some of them because to the naked eye they look like a pen line or dot much like the full stop at the end of this sentence.
Component size and processing power are not the only key points I know this but it is one of the leading factors.

But the question I really scratch my head on is this... will machine intelligence be a mimic that merely by slight of hand "appears to have Consciousness" or will it be a true independent mind?
Now there is a philosophical conundrum to be discussed over a wisky or two.

 

[stonehart]

And as surface mount components go that is a big component by the way

 

[marduk]

Yes it is. And in time it will only grow, as computers advance.

True. But not today.

There will be day in the future where machines will fool the overwhelming majority of people into thinking they were interacting with a human.

Also true, but not true today... and in any rate, I personally don't find it interesting when machines masquerade as people.

I would find it far more interesting witnessing the ascension of a truly sentient machine and witnessing it's unique perspective on the universe and it's maker.

"Case, this is Wintermute. We need to talk."
- William Gibson, Neuromancer. Wintermute is half of a shackled AI.

 

[Wade]

I am as I've mentioned many times very open minded and not one to dismiss any school of thought out of hand but while I'll concede the idea of computers being more intelligent than us in the future...hell, my Samsung S4 is smarter than me right noe..I just don't see them achieving consciousness outside of a ham handed attempt by man to "install" consciousness..As stoney implied some kind of slight of hand...quite possibly for the intent of trying to give it some semblance of humanity so that we can relate to them. Consciousness isn't something that is learned, it's something that is imprinted at birth and shapes our life path.

 

[BoyintheMachine]

But the question I really scratch my head on is this... will machine intelligence be a mimic that merely by slight of hand "appears to have Consciousness" or will it be a true independent mind?
Now there is a philosophical conundrum to be discussed over a wisky or two.

Do you have a real consciousness, a real mind? Or is your belief that you are conscious merely an illusion brought about by the own complexity of billions of neurons interacting?

 

[stonehart]

Do you have a real consciousness, a real mind? Or is your belief that you are conscious merely an illusion brought about by the own complexity of billions of neurons interacting?

Oh boy man that is a can of worms

But yes I get what you are getting at.

 

[BoyintheMachine]

I am as I've mentioned many times very open minded and not one to dismiss any school of thought out of hand but while I'll concede the idea of computers being more intelligent than us in the future...hell, my Samsung S4 is smarter than me right noe..I just don't see them achieving consciousness outside of a ham handed attempt by man to "install" consciousness..As stoney implied some kind of slight of hand...quite possibly for the intent of trying to give it some semblance of humanity so that we can relate to them. Consciousness isn't something that is learned, it's something that is imprinted at birth and shapes our life path.

I think the point you are missing is you can't prove you are conscious. Nobody can. So how can we deny something to machines when we can't even establish what it is?

 

[Wade]

I think the point you are missing is you can't prove you are conscious. Nobody can. So how can we deny something to machines when we can't even establish what it is?

well that IS intriguing, I actually hasn't thought of that. that perhaps we only think we have a conscious. In as much as people in here have posted the idea that we ourselves may be part of a computer program...which I admittedly never dismissed... i suppose you could argue that our concept of a conscious is also a program so I just backed into my own argument.

 

[dyingsun]

We are. Conscious that is, or what our definition of the term at least implies..

 

[marduk]

Machine intelligence is inevitable at this point

Perhaps yes, perhaps no.

The question is, is intelligence an emergent property or not? If it is, then yes, machine intelligence is likely unless we hit some unknown Moore's law breaker or we blow ourselves back to the stone age.

If it isn't an emergent property...

Well then, all bets are off. For a generalized machine intelligence, anyway.

 

[marduk]

well that IS intriguing, I actually hasn't thought of that. that perhaps we only think we have a conscious. In as much as people in here have posted the idea that we ourselves may be part of a computer program...which I admittedly never dismissed... i suppose you could argue that our concept of a conscious is also a program so I just backed into my own argument.

The whole point of the Turing test is that if you can't tell if it's intelligent or not, then you should assume that it is.

In other words, since we give each other the benefit of the doubt, we'd need to do the same for the machine.

 

[Constance]

And in related "news"...

World’s Supercomputers Release Study Confirming They Are Not Powerful Enough | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Priceless.

 

[boomerang]

My intuitive feeling is that if a truly intelligent computer ever comes about, it will grow from the ground up, much in the way our species seems to have done. It seems as if the AI coders want to sit down and construct a kind of magic box with consciousness that floats "somewhere" within a tangle of algorithms. Another way of making my point is that I would be much more impressed with a robot that could simply find its way around the town or countryside, relying on ingenuity for electric plug-ins or food needed for its survival without a pre-programmed internal map, than a verbal only braniac that "sounds" human. In fact, I don't think we even yet have the ability to construct an artificial cockroach.

 

[Constance]

from The Telegraph:

Computer passes the Turing Test? I'm not convinced
University of Reading claims a computer program passed the Turing Test and convinced judges it was a 13-year-old boy. But does it really count, asks Matthew Sparkes

Alan Turing Photo: AFP


By Matthew Sparkes, Deputy Head of Technology

12:16PM BST 09 Jun 2014

133 Comments


“Computer passes Turing Test for the first time after convincing users it is human”, read our headline over the weekend. Five different programs were put on trial at the Royal Society on Saturday and one – named Eugene Goostman – managed to convince the judges that it was a real boy.

The idea of testing for evidence of “thinking” in computers was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, in what has become a seminal paper in the field of artificial intelligence. He called the test the “imitation game”: a judge talks to one human and one machine via a system that obscures everything but text. If he or she is fooled more than 30 per cent of the time, the machine can be thought of as intelligent.

Eugene fooled people 33 per cent of the time, which does pass Turing’s test, even if the vast majority of judges were able to see the truth.

But does this latest success – which coincidentally landed on the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death – count?

My first concern is that the code pretends to be a child of 13. This seems to bend the rules slightly. Turing does talk of creating a child in code in his paper, but only in the context of it being a step on the road to replicating an adult mind: create a child, which is in theory a simpler task, and then educate it as you would any real human.

Using the limited life experience, vocabulary and sophistication of language of a child is a slight smokescreen that could, perhaps, be used to mask a range of flaws or weak points.

Secondly, it pretends to be a 13-year-old child from Ukraine, where the first language is not English. But the contest was performed in England with largely English-speaking judges. Again, this seems to be a slight fudge. It makes the test far easier if you have a plausible excuse for unnatural grammar.

Details of the recent test are thin on the ground – although they are being published in a scientific paper soon. The judges were made up of members of the public, Lord Sharkey, Robert Llewellyn (who played Kryten in Red Dwarf) and Aaron Sloman who is a world leading AI professor. There were a total of 300 conversations on the day. This all bodes well, and Professor John Barnden, formerly head of the British AI Society, adjudicated.

But I spoke to the University of Reading this morning to ask for full transcripts of the conversations and was denied. I was sent some previous transcripts from Eugene, one of which is replicated below, that do not exactly paint a picture of intelligence. It’s easy to see how 67 per cent of people became suspicious.

Perhaps the defining vote on this will fall to a $20,000 gambling slip: Ray Kurzweil, Google’s director of engineering, has a long-standing bet with Mitch Kapor, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on whether any computer will pass the test by 2029. If the pessimistic Kapor pays out, I’ll concede that Eugene has passed muster. Until then, I’ll wait to read the published paper before deciding.

In any case, Eugene is no small achievement: creating code that can even come close to natural language is a hugely difficult problem which seems simpler now than it did in 1950 purely because a huge number of talented people have been working on it since.

And the truth is that artificial intelligence is a science which already affects every one of us, every day, whether Eugene is a convincing schoolboy or not. In narrow fields computers are already beating humans at a range of tasks: expert systems can diagnose tricky diseases, computers are beating investment professionals at picking stocks and genetic algorithms design more efficient computer chips than humans can dream up – in many cases we don’t even understand how those designs work, but we go ahead and manufacture, ship and sell them regardless. They're in your mobile phone right now.

Transcript of Eugene talking to a human judge:
Judge: Hi, I'm Cathy.

Entity: Cathy! Nice to meet you! You're a woman, if I'm not mistaken.

Judge: Right. What is your name?

Entity: People call me Eugene. Or "Zhenya". It is a short name for Eugene in Russia and Ukraine.

Judge: Nice name. Are you from either area?

Entity: Agree Oh, what a fruitful conversation;-)

Judge: Do you really think so?

Entity: No, your guess was wrong. I don't think so. By the way, I still don't know your specialty - or, possibly, I've missed it?

Judge: What speciality? What's yours?

Entity: Huh? And I forgot to ask you where you are from...

Judge: The universe and you?

Entity: Is it your hobby to ask little poor Jewish boys such tricky questions they don't have an answer for?


Computer passes the Turing Test? I'm not convinced - Telegraph

 

[marduk]

My intuitive feeling is that if a truly intelligent computer ever comes about, it will grow from the ground up, much in the way our species seems to have done. It seems as if the AI coders want to sit down and construct a kind of magic box with consciousness that floats "somewhere" within a tangle of algorithms. Another way of making my point is that I would be much more impressed with a robot that could simply find its way around the town or countryside, relying on ingenuity for electric plug-ins or food needed for its survival without a pre-programmed internal map, than a verbal only braniac that "sounds" human. In fact, I don't think we even yet have the ability to construct an artificial cockroach.

Well... maybe.

Yes, in the totality of life on earth the ration of body:brain size and complexity of animal's brains seems to have increased over time, particularly in the homo line:

But as you can see something odd happened around 1.7MYA with Homo habilis. Suddenly we see a hockey stick effect with cranial size.

We don't know what caused it, current thinking seems to indicate a sudden evolutionary pressure favouring intelligence.

Also something really odd happened about 40,000 years ago... we suddenly started to have highly complex rituals, complex art, complex language, and complex religion develop.

Graham Hancock argues that this is when consciousness really started to pick up steam with the advent of complex symbology, and was due partly to the discovery and use of hallucinogens.

"It's just amazing the way the archaeological record 'lights up' after 40,000 years ago with incredible symbolism, the appearance of the first art, evidence across a whole spectrum of activities of exactly what we would recognise as completely modern human behaviour, and it seems to switch on very suddenly. I realised that this is where the mystery lies, this is the mystery that I want to explore. Whatever it was, this process that made us human, right there at the very beginning was art, and incredible symbolism...the art of the painted caves of Europe for example, going back 35,000 years...

Thanks to modern scientific work with volunteers who are given hallucinogens and whose experiences are studied, we know the typical visionary sequence begins with patterns and geometrical forms - dots, dashes, zig-zag lines - and gradually begins to turn into a fuller sense of altered reality in which the individual may very often see human beings partially transformed into animals. And this is exactly what we see in the cave art in Europe and in the rock art of the Bushmen in South Africa, this mixture of geometric and strange visionary forms showing transformed beings. We don’t have the space to go into it here but I set out the evidence at length in Supernatural. The bottom line is there’s very little doubt that the explanation that David Lewis-Williams has come to, that this is the art of altered states of consciousness, is the correct one."​

The Official Graham Hancock Website: Supernatural

It would appear that consciousness evolved with fits and starts throughout our history, and more than just complexity and capacity for consciousness is involved... we may need to kick start the machine and teach it to dream.

 

[Jeff Davis]

Yes it is. And in time it will only grow, as computers advance. There will be day in the future where machines will fool the overwhelming majority of people into thinking they were interacting with a human.

No doubt about it in my mind. However, when we speak of intelligence, that is not consciousness. Even sentience itself is not consciousness. It is unclear, or undefined as to what is consciousness. Is it the envelope that both these attributes are contained within? Is consciousness itself the Superspectrum and our temporal experiences the direct result of the human species indigenous interactions within as much? No clue, but the possibilities are staggering.

You see, you raise an extremely CRITICAL point when you survey and consider what is artificial intelligence. AI equals artificial cognition. The neural electrical based processing of the human mind. However there are far more things that we do not understand with respect to the multiprocessing intricacies of the human mind than what we do know at this time. The ultra adaptive plasticity of the brain's ability to model itself alone should make those in the AI community squirm in undulations of uncertainty with respect to artificially replicating cognition. Let alone what is the real nature of established sentience.

 

[marduk]

They're related, though.

Intelligence (by which I mean generalized intelligences like us) is roughly defined as the ability to have logic, reason, problem solving, and the ability to learn. There are specialized areas of intelligence like medicine or chess playing which machines may in fact already have the upper hand, but that's not generally what we mean.

Sentience is generally thought to be the ability to feel and perceive. The "sen" comes from "sense" and is considered to be a distinction from reason.

Consciousness is generally thought of as the ability to be self-aware; that is, I exist (as in I think therefore I am), and I am in some sense distinct from my environment. If you've ever had kids, there is this moment that you can see as a parent where it suddenly dawns on your child that he or she is different and distinct from you, or the dog, or whatever. It's a wonderful moment. Many consider consciousness and sentience roughly equivalent.

The real question in terms of machine intelligence, is that can Turing machines (which all computers are) become or replicate intelligence? Or sentience/consciousness?

One can go down interesting logical pathways like "since the human brain can simulate a Turing machine, can a Turing machine simulate a human brain?" This is essentially Kurzweil's argument -- that eventually we will have computers fast enough to simulate the human mind at the atomic level, therefore they can simulate (or replicate) intelligence and consciousness.

This of course remains to be seen. I, for one, think there's something special about the structure human mind -- it acts quite differently from, say, a blue whale's mind which is far larger, with more neurons. Culture and how we raise our children likely also play a larger role than we'd like to think in terms of intelligence and consciousness. One wonders if the modern homo sapiens sapiens of 200,000 years ago were conscious in the terms we think of; or if their cousins homo sapiens neanderthalis were.

 

[Jeff Davis]

It is incredibly complex. Honestly far more so than I personally have the knowledge or ability to elaborate on. As sentient beings we experience reality on so many "subjectively felt" levels that I am forced to reduce as much, certainly not to so much just "self awareness", but rather, perceptions and experiences within the environment of consciousness based entirely on self. Sentience might be described as the ability to recognize the dreamer and the drempt simultaneously.

In fact, if one understands that within a dream your self is the fragmented representation of multiple characters within that dream, we can literally understand the construction of our self made and driven realities.

IMO, and that's all it is, consciousness is the environmental attribute that makes this reflective process possible. For me sentience is like a grain of self organizing and inherently designed ongoing creation. A single sand grain that results is an infinite beach of unique reality. The unity of ongoing experiential existence based on a self driven sentient relativity.

Personally, I do not believe that consciousness is contained within us. I believe we are contained within it. JMO.

 

[marduk]

Personally, I do not believe that consciousness is contained within us. I believe we are contained within it. JMO.

What is the reasoning for this belief and what would the information transfer mechanism be between the external consciousness and your brain?

 

[Jeff Davis]

What is the reasoning for this belief and what would the information transfer mechanism be between the external consciousness and your brain?

Non-local consciousness is really a matter of consideration best served by Occam's Razor. Why do people pronounced dead, see themselves laying there dead, completely "removed" from themselves, and by memory catalog various physical attributes and objects in the immediate vicinity that they could not have possibly known about otherwise? Why and how do multiple individuals hallucinate the same imagery? The consciousness experience we maintain is independent of physically restricted qualities IMO.

Consciousness (IMO) is a naturally interactive two part process based on polarized attraction. No different from any other such process in nature. Human beings are basically primary consciousness producing amplifiers/receivers that are in constant interplay with what is environmental, or "mother" consciousness. I refer to EC (environmental consciousness) as secondary due to our relationship to as much. This is actually a falsehood however in the big picture because all matter is born of environmental consciousness, or "God" if you will. However, due to the falsifiability of the scientific process, we have to start with ourselves. An undeniable quantification wherein measurement can gain traction. So, I call us loosely the primary aspect in the equation. This is an equation that I am unable to present to anyone at this time as I do not pretend to understand as much intricately in the least.

The problem with consciousness is that we have not developed (at least in terms of public awareness) technology that can contain, and thereby isolate, quantifiable frequency states beyond that which we can detect electromagnetically. It may not be possible for us at all apart from real consciousness independent AI which of course at this time does not exist, that we know of.

Thanks Marduk. I apologize for the grief I caused you some time back, and I do appreciate your interest and furthering inspirations as all curiosity is an absolute inspiration to myself. In completely hypothetical matters such as these, it's critical to remember the words of one of the greatest Physicists of all time, Max Planck: Anybody who has been seriously engaged is scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientist cannot dispense with.

Planck and Einstein both were exceptionally profound philosophers.