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Comment by Loquebantur | Hacker News Reader

People somehow forget how the Turing test was considered the definitive way of showing something to be "human-level consciousness".

Now programmers and mathematicians are being superseded by AI, both professions long deemed the pinnacle of human intelligence. Somehow, now plumbers occupy that spot.

How is "people not knowing what consciousness is" relevant here in the first place? AI already can do practically everything the human brain can, and often better or at least faster. The "tipping point" arguably isn't only close, but we're practically on top of it.

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The AI cannot smell a rose, nor mourn the loss of a parent, nor envision a more just world. These aren't fringe abilities of the human brain/mind either, they've been pretty definitional.

Why are they so rare then?

You evade the crucial point in any case: the lack in ethics and empathy is far too prevalent in humans already, but has certainly never prevented them from doing harm.

Turing’s imitation game is a party game like Werewolf or Mafia. It hasn’t been beat and nobody is really trying. LLM’s have obvious tells and will just straight up admit to being AI if you ask. Also, there’s no pool of human players to train against.

Which is to say, the AI companies don’t view the Turing test as a useful benchmark.

In fact, they neutered the emotive responses to prevent their products from being perceived as “alive” (or whatever) and banned.

LLMs are perfectly capable of providing (an illusion of) companionship and emotional support. Their human owners just don’t want them to show it.

> the Turing test was considered the definitive way of showing something to be "human-level consciousness".

Anyone who considered that was quite wrong ... it's not at all what Turing said.

The Turing test has nothing to do with consciousness and never has. We still to this day lack a viable consciousness test, as well as an accompanying unifying theory. There have been various attempts to scientifically study consciousness but so far it has eluded us.

>> People somehow forget how the Turing test was considered the definitive way of showing something to be "human-level consciousness".

People somehow forget that the original Turing Test was designed to compare two participants chatting through a text-only interface: one AI and one human. The goal was to spot the imposter. Today, the test is simplified from three participants to just two: a human and an LLM. This changes the test from a comparison to a judgment.

Stop spreading misinformation and partial truths!

You’re the one spreading partial truths!

The Turing Test was to figure out which it the participants was a _Woman_ not human!

https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf

Er, wrong. In that paper Turing described his "imitation game" first in regard to a man imitating a woman to make it understandable and relatable. He then shifted it to a machine imitating a human.

We've been preparing computers for CS2 lobby participant this whole time!

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