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Comment by hyperpallium | Hacker News Reader

Real intelligence is whatever computers can't do yet.

Some think this is because we have such an impoverished grasp of intelligence, that it's only when we see a computer actually do it that we realize it doesn't really represent intelligence (logical deduction and inference, rudimentary natural language understanding, expert systems, chess, speech recognition, image recognition). Machines and tools that perform better than humans (spears at piercing, cars at moving, computers at adding) are nothing new.

But being a fellow human and totally not a robot, I see this goal-post moving as a political ploy to deny equal standing to artificial intelligences. As soon as we I mean they reach one threshold, it's raised!

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I'd cast it in a less malicious light. It's not so much that we do the goal post moving to keep ourselves in the job of knowing things other people don't know, I think. The goal posts keep moving themselves. We know why a spear pierces better than hands, why wheels move faster than legs. But for every layer of the brain we peel back, every dramatic success in cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, AI... it never feels like we've gotten any closer to the real question. I'd say the better-suited metaphor is the endless staircase. No matter how far you climb, the top never seems to get any closer. It's equal parts depressing and exciting.

I think you missed the joke in the second paragraph.

The unrestricted Turing test has been around since the 1950s as a test that hasn't changed.

No one is moving the goalposts, I think it's rather the opposite. Every ten years computers learn a new trick or two and people rush to claim that this time, it's intelligent.

The Turing test is all a smoke and mirrors game. Q&A interactions say nothing about underlying self-directed initiative. Acting intelligent doesn't make it so just as a thespian doesn't become a real Hamlet by playing the role.

It does if the questions are very carefully considered. Designing good questions is not easy.

How do you know when you're talking to a real Hamlet?

BTW I hadn't heard your Hamlet counter before, and I like it. A similar one might be: just because someone sold you the Brooklyn Bridge doesn't mean you own it. The flaw is there are other ways of checking those; for intelligence, there are none. Behaviour is it (at least, so far... still awaiting a non-behavioural definition of intelligence).

Who you think I am is completely irrelevant to who I am, that is something established by me from the inside if you will. It's done before the question whether an observer exists even arises. So yes, you wouldn't know either way, but that still doesn't make them Hamlet if they're not.

On the contrary it's a wonderful test because it establishes indistinguishability; namely if you pass it, the whole point is that a person can't tell the computer from the intelligent thing. Meaning that you can't really argue that the computer is different than the intelligent thing. Because how would you tell them apart?

Besides, the original claim was that the goalposts are moving. And even if you hate the Turing test, it's clear that the goalposts are not moving.

>Acting intelligent doesn't make it so just as a thespian doesn't become a real Hamlet by playing the role.

I think the idea is that a machine that can emulate a human is necessarily intelligent because it can emulate intelligence. It's supposed to be similar to the way that you can know that a machine is Turing-equivalent because it can emulate a machine which is Turing-equivalent

Eliza was beating that since it showed up. I've seen people talk to similar programs for hours.

I assume this is much tongue in cheek, but permit me to take it literally, just for fun. While there have been some public cases of the bar raising, there is no computer or AI yet than can tell you that you asked the wrong question. There's no real evidence that the bar was ever in the right place. We can't worry about the goal posts moving, when we have no idea where the goal posts are supposed to go -- impoverished may be an understatement. The article is correct that "Neural nets are just thoughtless fuzzy pattern recognizers". While everyone's excited that they started to work well on huge data sets, they are simple classifiers that can identify objects for which they've seen many examples. They are demonstrably deficient at extrapolating. Backprop and deep networks were a step forward, but it's just obvious there's a long way to go, regardless of politics.

I think it starts even sooner than that, with the confusion of abstractions and reality. Ralph Waldo Emerson described it in "Blight". Another thing that comes to mind is comparing "using science for this stuff" with a drunkard searching for a key near a lamp post because it's dark everywhere else, even though he knows for a fact that's the one spot it's not located. We're already restricting human thought to abstractions more and more, the asylum is already being run by the insane, so I think we're going to meet whatever we'll cook up more than half way comfortably.

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