computers were being developed actual
working computers and it was widely
believed and still is that sooner or
later they'll be massive computers with
very rapid processing and they can deal
with huge amounts of data carry out some
statistical procedure on the data and
something miraculous will come out it's
still very widely believed that people
are very misled by it
in fact there's there's something called
the
Turing test which is probably heard
about which, every year there's a
competition if you win it you get a
hundred-thousand dollars to pass something
called the Turing test, a totally
meaningless task it's is it supposed to
show it can you show that machine's
think it's all based on a paper of Alan
Turing's it was a great position and one
sounds of computational science and as
an eight-page paper that he wrote in
1950 on whether machines can think he
starts off the paper by saying the
question whether machines can think is
too meaningless deserve discussion that
sentence has somehow been ignored and
the entire literature and there's a good
reason for it because to ask whether
machines think is basically asking
what kind of metaphor you like that's
like asking do submarine swim, well
from a certain point you can say so
from another point of view not but it's
not a meaningful question he
proposed this imitation game which is now called
the Turing Test for a different
reason he said it'll be interesting to,
the idea is to see if you can construct a
program that'll
delude a blind observer you know and
then see what's going on but not be
able to distinguish the program to a
person
ok he says it will be useful for trying
to as a challenge to create bigger
machines better machines
ok maybe so that probably was but it
doesn't tell you anything about whether machines can
think in fact the whole idea of machines
thinking is posed in a way which is
almost designed to cause confusion I
should say that the people who are
confused by this are some of the most of
the leading philosophers most
influential philosophers and scientists
and others not a trivial thing won't
mention names with many of you know for
one thing machine the computer itself is
maybe useful as a paperweight
it doesn't do anything what is doing
anything is the program that you put
into it
ok so the real quick if you want to pose
the meaningless question it should be
can programs think? well what's a program
a program's just a theory written in a
crazy notation so that a machine can,
a computer can implement it, so the question
really is well, can this theory think in other
words is this a theory of thinking? Well I
know the answer is not unless you
understand something about thinking
nothing the theory of X just cause it
passes some meaningless test you know the
theory of X if it gives you insight and
understanding of the nature of X so the
real question is are the theories that
are written in these programs giving
us some insight into the nature of thinking?
And as soon as you pose that question you don't even
bother with the prize, because of course they're not.
