Rationally Speaking #113 - The Turing Test

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2014

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Did you know that an artificial intelligence named "Eugene Goostman" recently passed the Turing Test, our gold standard criterion for whether an AI is conscious? At least, that's what many media outlets breathlessly reported. In this episode of Rationally Speaking, Julia and Massimo take a critical look at Eugene, and at the Turing test in general as a standard for consciousness. In the process they debate what it would mean for an AI to be conscious, and how we could ever tell.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.
0:35.9	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:41.1	I'm your host, Massimo Piliucci, and with me as always is my co-host, Julia Galev.
0:46.0	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:48.8	Well, Massimo, we're going to kick off today's discussion with the recent news from earlier this month that a computer program
0:57.4	has apparently passed the Turing test, which is a classic measure of whether computer programs
1:07.3	can be considered to have human level intelligence or, you know, a functional
1:11.5	equivalent. So this computer program whose name was rather amusingly Eugene, successfully convinced...
1:18.6	He actually had a last name as well, Guestman. Eugene Guzman, right? Yes, that's right. You're
1:23.3	right. That is more amusing. Yeah, so Eugene Guzman, this computer program successfully convinced one-third of judges in this recent test that he was not a computer program, but instead a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy who had learned English as a second language.
1:40.5	And this was heralded by many as a successful pass on the Turing test.
1:49.2	Yeah.
1:49.7	So there's been some discussion of what, if anything, we should in fact conclude from Eugene's successful, if you want to call it that,
2:00.1	passing on the test.
2:02.3	Right.
2:02.8	So it might come as no surprise,
2:06.0	but I'm a little,
2:07.0	in fact, more than a little skeptical about this whole thing.
2:09.9	I'm in good company, apparently.
2:11.3	I mean, lots of people have actually been writing
2:13.1	about this Brouha, about the Turing test.
	...

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