Turing Test - Blog Posts
jaggedwolf said: can’t say this and not link/say which one it is
the original “turing test” paper is so beautiful. more beautiful, i imagine, than most expect going in—he’s got this underlying warm humanism and gentle humor throughout. (it’s present even in his more technical papers, but it shines here)
and the section that slays me each time is this:
“It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it […]”
like. this is the original “turing test” paper. this is the first dude to formally conceptualize the whole “~*~what if computers learn to think, how could we tell~*~” thing. which, in subsequent SF invocations, is used mostly in spooky or paranoid contexts: the Voigt-Kampff test of Blade Runner, the preemptive rushes to constrain that budding will in I, Robot and others, and in modern worries over AGI. and i like those stories! they’re interesting and cool and eerie!
but
but
the original guy was not scared or unsettled or spooked by the prospect of new minds. this dude’s primary concern, when facing the dawn of artificial intelligence, was instead: “what if we teach computers to think and then the other kids on the playground bully the computer, that would be so mean :(((”
i love that, so much. i love people so much, sighs into hands
jaggedwolf said: can’t say this and not link/say which one it is
the original “turing test” paper is so beautiful. more beautiful, i imagine, than most expect going in—he’s got this underlying warm humanism and gentle humor throughout. (it’s present even in his more technical papers, but it shines here)
and the section that slays me each time is this:
“It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it […]”
like. this is the original “turing test” paper. this is the first dude to formally conceptualize the whole “~*~what if computers learn to think, how could we tell~*~” thing. which, in subsequent SF invocations, is used mostly in spooky or paranoid contexts: the Voigt-Kampff test of Blade Runner, the preemptive rushes to constrain that budding will in I, Robot and others, and in modern worries over AGI. and i like those stories! they’re interesting and cool and eerie!
but
but
the original guy was not scared or unsettled or spooked by the prospect of new minds. this dude’s primary concern, when facing the dawn of artificial intelligence, was instead: “what if we teach computers to think and then the other kids on the playground bully the computer, that would be so mean :(((”
i love that, so much. i love people so much, sighs into hands
