It’s great to trace things back to Alan
Turing.
You know he’s in Bletchley Park, England.
He had come up with the concept of the universal
computing machine but then he has to help
put it in practice to break the German wartime
code.
So he comes up with a device called the bomb
and then colossus and these are machines that
can break the code and he starts thinking
about the difference between human imagination
and machine intelligence.
And it goes back to what he calls Lady Lovelace’s
objection.
It goes back to Ada Lovelace a hundred years
earlier who had said machines will be able
to do everything except think.
And so Turing comes up with what he calls
the imitation game.
Now we call it the Turing test in which he
tries to figure out how would you tell the
difference between a human and a machine.
How would you know the machine’s not intelligent.
He says well put a human and a machine in
a different room, we send them in questions
and if after a while you can’t tell which
one’s a machine and which one’s a human,
then it makes no sense to say the machine
isn’t thinking.
Now you can have philosophical arguments about
whether or not that’s a good test but ever
since then, it’s been about 65 years since
he came up with that concept, we’ve been
trying to invent machines that would pass
the Turing test or the imitation game.
Every now and then you read about a machine
that can sort of do conversational gambits
and maybe confuse a person for five minutes
or so and sort of try to pass the Turing test.
But surprisingly we found it very difficult
to have machines that can really carry on
a conversation and be confused with a human.
You can usually tell the machine from the
human.
A different way of looking at the way the
computer age evolved is sort of Ada Lovelace’s
way which is that computers and humans will
evolve symbiotically.
They’ll be partners.
We will get more intimately connected to our
machines and the machines will amplify our
intelligence and our creativity will amplify
what the machines could do.
And we don’t need to try to create robots
that’ll work without us.
It’s kind of cooler to create this partnership
of humans and technology or as she put it
the humanities and engineering.
So those are really the two schools of thought
in computer programming.
And every now and then you hear people say
the singularity’s coming or we’re about
to get to the age of artificial intelligence
and machine learning.
And I suspect it may come but it’s always
about 20 years away.
And in the meantime it’s sort of the Ada
Lovelace vision rather than the Alan Turing
vision.
The vision of having machines that connect
to us more intimately rather than replace
us and don’t need us anymore.
