How do you know that the person at the other end of the phone when you call to report that your laptop/internet line/microwave oven or whatever is malfunctioning? Because based upon your questions, the respondent answers in a fashion that is characteristic of human intelligence. This is, in short what the Turing Test is. If you cannot distinguish between the responses offered by the machine and those that might presumably be offered by a human being, then the machine is said to possess human like intelligence.
The catch, of course is the nature of the conversation. In a day where most of our problems (at least those of the nature detailed earlier) are solved by people sitting far away (India, Pakistan, Phillipines, take your pick) with computers and telephone headsets, the degree to which the conversation may act as a test of intelligence is questionable. Personally, I have found that these people operate much like machines offering solutions from a large, but nevertheless fixed menu which has been written down by the powers that be. Flexibility, which is the hallmark of thought seems to have been lost with the standard response being, 'let me check with my supervisor.' Why then, should we employ humans in such positions at all? And this question was answered convincingly in the negative by many companies which now rely upon voice activated menus to help you through life.
However, let us get back to the initial topic of conversations with machines. The most famous such conversational line in public memory is, of course, 'There appears to be a problem with the AE 35 unit'. But then again, the gigantic intelligence of HAL9000, the fictional computer created by Arthur C Clarke which went insane is not something that we are even close to achieving. So while the topic of Artificial Intelligence is one that I might explore in later blogs, here is a conversation between a human and a computer to start off with.
The catch, of course is the nature of the conversation. In a day where most of our problems (at least those of the nature detailed earlier) are solved by people sitting far away (India, Pakistan, Phillipines, take your pick) with computers and telephone headsets, the degree to which the conversation may act as a test of intelligence is questionable. Personally, I have found that these people operate much like machines offering solutions from a large, but nevertheless fixed menu which has been written down by the powers that be. Flexibility, which is the hallmark of thought seems to have been lost with the standard response being, 'let me check with my supervisor.' Why then, should we employ humans in such positions at all? And this question was answered convincingly in the negative by many companies which now rely upon voice activated menus to help you through life.
However, let us get back to the initial topic of conversations with machines. The most famous such conversational line in public memory is, of course, 'There appears to be a problem with the AE 35 unit'. But then again, the gigantic intelligence of HAL9000, the fictional computer created by Arthur C Clarke which went insane is not something that we are even close to achieving. So while the topic of Artificial Intelligence is one that I might explore in later blogs, here is a conversation between a human and a computer to start off with.
No comments:
Post a Comment