Look Who it Was Random video

David Pearce - The Turing Test is Insufficient

600 views · Published 3 July 2014 · 34:21 · Indexed 24 October 2026

Channel: Science, Technology & the Future · 2014 · Science & Technology

Watch on YouTube

The media wildly overstates the abilities of the 'Eugene Goostman' chatbot.  
The danger is that we extrapolate that in 20 years time non-biological intelligence is going to surpass humans (or organic robots) like us in all fields - where there is an immense range of cognitive tasks that a normal classical digital computer can accomplish.

Alan Turing - clearly he was an extraordinary fellow... but whether the Turing Test should really be taken as definitive - well here I am extremely skeptical.   There is another fellow I regard of equal intellectual stature,  that is Alexander Sasha Shulgin who pioneered the methodology of systematic scientific exploration of altered states of consciousness and the design of pharmacological tools to enable us to explore them.  I think any full-spectrum super-intelligence will need the capacity to explore both the formal and the subjective properties of mind, matter and energy as well as the inter-relationships between them - because if the distinction between the formal and the subjective properties of mind were entirely clean it wouldn't be possible for us to elude to these subjective properties at all.
IT Professionals may think 'Are you challenging the Church Turing thesis?' - the idea that any effective computation can be carried out by a Turing Machine? and the kinds of questions that I'm interested in, that Sascha Shulgin was interested in,  are not well defined or well posed questions within any orthodox context of computer science. Questions about consciousness, phenomenal binding, trying to read off the myriad values of qualia from underlying formalism, these kinds of question is very hard to answer within the orthodox context of computer science - theoretically very hard to accomplish with a Turing Machine.

Phenomenal Binding cannot be performed on purely classical digital computers.

Subscribe to this Channel: http://youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=TheRationalFuture

Science, Technology & the Future: http://scifuture.org

Humanity+:  http://humanityplus.org

2014 07 02 19 08 12

More from this channel