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Comment by gremlinsinc | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why that's frustrating, without image and speech recognition AI isn't possible. -- How intelligent could people be without sensory perception? Hellen Keller is the exception, take away the ability for humans to process sound, and images as a species and we wouldn't be nearly as advanced as we are today even if we still had the same brain structure and mental capacity.

Ray Kurzweil understood this and is why he paved the way for some of the first speech / image recognition platforms like ocr/fax/etc...

To me speech/image recognition is a precursor/adjunct of AI. You can have the former without the latter, but the latter will never be realized without those.

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Lots of good questions about what I mean by AI. I agree my statement wasn't very precise. And to be honest, that's a reflection of me not having a precise definition of what it is, exactly. However, I do think there's a distinction between speech/image recognition and what's commonly understood as AI, with speech and image recognition being sensory input systems, and AI in a more colloquial sense, such as learning and problem solving on at approximately human level. My statement was imprecise, and given I was expressing frustration at imprecision, my bad :)

Thanks for the feedback! Gives me more to think about.

> I don't get why that's frustrating, without image and speech recognition AI isn't possible

Wait, what? The most commonly known (and perhaps oldest) AI test in no way requires either image nor speech recognition.

Millions of blind and deaf human beings would like to disagree with your claim that they are not intelligent or sentient beings.

Seriously, what is the basis of this claim?

I'm not saying one can't be smart/intelligent without being able to see/hear, I'm saying if you take away all senses from ALL human beings there won't be any way to communicate at all, or know that others exist, and to learn from them. Learning is what makes intelligence possible--and the passing of information through generations. Hellen Keller fought extremely hard to overcome her sensory issues, but she had a good teacher, who presumably had someone else help them or guide them some. -- But to organically learn to speak when nobody can hear you, or to read when you can't even feel the braile, etc..would be nearly impossible.

> Learning is what makes intelligence possible

Intelligence (at least in this case) is being able to take data and draw conclusions from it, but you just can't see such potential when you don't have input. Is a computer not a calculator when there's no software installed? No. It's still a calculator, but it just doesn't have inputs. One day, we may be able to give sight to the blind, but for now, considering such people without ANY learning capacity as "unintelligent" is still wrong.

On the other hand, if you had true AI first, you'd just say "here's an input device; figure out how to parse the data."

Perhaps because "true AI" is an illusion. There is always a better term that has meaning.

And yet people like Ray Kurzweil toss the term around as if it does have meaning. What's the point unless you define it? You might as well reference anti gravity or teleportation.

It's something to work towards, always on the horizon.

Kurzweil was a great inventor once but he's a prophet now and he needs to speak prophetically, not scientifically.

The touring test shows AI has little to do with image or speech recognition. An AI that operates in a purely virtual environment would still be revolutionary.

The Turing test doesn't test for intelligence, simply human-like communication. Things like lying, typing errors, or reaction to insult aren't indicators of an artificial intelligence, but are requirements for passing the Turing test.

One of the biggest criticisms of the Turing test is, because it's a behavioral or functional test, there is no way to ensure that the computer is actually thinking intelligently at all, rather than following a very-well-articulated rules engine.

This is also true for pwople. How do you know humans are thinking and not following lots of social rules they learn thanks to special neural hardware for learning social interaction?

Think about the intelligence conveyed in ritualized greetings.

You are recapitulating Descartes. Consciousness appears to be immeasurable. You can only know that you are conscious. It is polite to give others the benefit of doubt.

The commenter said nothing about consciousness. He simply said that just being able to hold a conversation is not a particularly useful measure of intelligence. The broader form of that is that we don't even know if humans in general are intelligent.

You can know that you are conscious, but how do you know you are intelligent?

I can think of no better test of whether some specific being is intelligent than fooling another human into thinking they are.

Can you think of a better one?

> because it's a behavioral or functional test

What else would you test for in an AI other than its output and behavior? Conversely: how would you test a human for intelligence other than through its output and behavior?

Surely that depends upon the human? An infant would do a terrible job. An institutionalized vegetable would fail to provide meaningful information.

A not-very-bright cousin of mine has been heard responding to robo-calls. Would his opinion do?

I think 'intelligence' is ambiguous, but many parts of it can be measured to some degree. Lets give the AI the SAT test perhaps? Or a test of hypothetical arguments. Or ask it how it would tell if you were an intelligent being yourself. Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'.

We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance.

A test that confuses a human for a machine is not a problem. False negatives don't remove value from this test.

> Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'. This is precisely why the Turing Test is so tricky for machines. Knowing the parameters, any regular human could test even the most advanced present-day AI and reveal it as a machine with very little effort and only a few questions.

> We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance.

The Turing Test does not intend to determine level of intelligence (it's not an IQ test). It is intended to determine whether the intelligence you're interacting with is advanced enough to fool you into thinking they are of human nature.

It is not a test of degree of intelligence, but rather of its nature. Human / not human are the only two possible outcomes.

That last bit is a false equivalence - we have no way with current science to truly introspect the "thought process" of another human, so functional judgment is the only kind we can exercise.

With AI - we built it. We can read the code that's running. We can make a distinction, in cases where output or behavior is identical, whether it's a neural network or a 12-million-line switch statement - and that value judgment means something to our determination of intelligence. There are plenty of ways other than (or in addition to) output to determine the "intelligence" of a machine that we simply can't exercise with other people.

It directly tests for intelligence, you confuse false negatives with false positives. An intelligent person that fails the test because they don't know a common language is fine.

Note: Medical tests generate both false positives and false negatives, they are still useful.

I don't understand what your example here about common language rebuts - that's something that would be solved for in the premise of the test, or it's not a fair test.

Is your argument that that person is still intelligent even if they've failed the test? Because that's the entirety of my point - the Turing test does not return a measure of intelligence, but of communicability.

Or is your point that if such a person fails it doesn't invalidate the test's measurement of intelligence? In a world where the test is implemented correctly, meaning where things like cross-language barriers are accounted for, failing to pass means failing to convince another person that you can communicate like a human would. If you fail, the only way you can consider that a "false negative" would be if you concede that the test is not a sufficient measure of intelligence but of ability to communicate - that's what makes it a FALSE negative.

No, the point is false negatives don't invalidate a test. It requires both intelligence and communication abilities.

Cost and accuracy are obvious trade-offs, but sometimes you are willing to trade say cost and false positives to avoid false negatives say, a mass screening for HIV in a blood sample. In that case you need a cheap test and while a false positive has minimal cost a false negative could be deadly.

Highering is the opposite case. Micdonalds want's a cheap test (interview + background) and as long they get enough acceptable low level candidate from their pool that's enough.

As such the turing test can fit the second example. A hypothetical AI could hold a huge range of real jobs even if limited to purely text based communications.

PS: Let's flip it. A super intelligent AI in a box that can't communicate in any form. Without IO it's indistinguishable from a space heater.

Your last example of the hyperintelligent space heater is exactly my point - the Turing test is a test of the (necessary) precondition of communication, but NOT a sufficient test of intelligence. In your example, the black box AI is assumed to be intelligent, but would still fail the Turing test - because intelligence is not a necessary condition for passing. Communicability IS necessary for the test.

A passing grade on the Turing test just indicates intelligence is possible, but excludes assured intelligence in the absence of communication ability, which is why I argue it is not a sufficient guarantee of intelligence.

You make a good point with the hiring example about the distinction between "intelligent" and "intelligent enough to do some things" - our disagreement may be stemming from us having differing definitions of "an intelligence". Need to think about it.

Nothing you just said invalidates the test.

X is a demonstration of intelligence says nothing about not X.

If you can design something that passes an arbitrary touring tests yes it is intelligent. For example I could teach it any subject that works in text format. It could then pass an open ended essay test. And get a reasonable essay.

Now, you could do the same thing with a pig and it would fail the test despite being more intelligent than the average dog. That just means there are limits.

So help me, I think you've convinced me. I don't know what to do with all this leftover xkcd/386 though.

Thanks for the great chat.

This is one of the practical limits of the Turing Test as usually proposed - the parties could just refuse to jump through the hoop of writing an essay, and that would be a perfectly normal reaction. In practice, attempts to pass the Turing Test have leaned heavily on hand-coded strategies for changing the subject and feigning refusal to co-operate, with some success - for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Goostman

What I find most interesting about that strategy is in practice it fails. The strength is it can push people to wait longer before judging. The weakness is it fails to demonstrate intelligence.

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