Philosophy 101 Unit 1

Next Sunday, the $100,000 Loebner Prize group will run their annual Turing test competition to determine the most linguistically competent computer. You can interact with most of these computers online, I’ll dig around for links. In the mean time:

Intelligent Computers put to the test (Guardian Online)

No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - ‘artificial conversational entities’ - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised ‘thinking’ machine. If any program succeeds, it is likely to be hailed as the most significant breakthrough in artificial intelligence since the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. It could also raise profound questions about whether a computer has the potential to be ‘conscious’ - and if humans should have the ‘right’ to switch it off.

Professor Kevin Warwick, a cyberneticist at the university, said: ‘I would say now that machines are conscious, but in a machine-like way, just as you see a bat or a rat is conscious like a bat or rat, which is different from a human. I think the reason Alan Turing set this game up was that maybe to him consciousness was not that important; it’s more the appearance of it, and this test is an important aspect of appearance.’

The six computer programs taking part in the test are called Alice, Brother Jerome, Elbot, Eugene Goostman, Jabberwacky and Ultra Hal. Their designers will be competing for an 18-carat gold medal and $100,000 offered by the Loebner Prize in Artificial Intelligence.

Reminder: Tonight (Thursday) @ 6pm in Greg 217: I will be giving a short paper entitled “What is the Internet?”

Tomorrow @ 3pm in Greg 213, Bernard Reginster “On being Looked At: Sartre on the Significance of Alienation”

Attend either talk (and say hi to me!) and I will mark you down for extra credit. 

Here are the prompts for this week’s R&L thread. Respond to this post by class on Tuesday for participation credit for the week. 

1) Is the mind a semantic engine? Why or why not?

2) Argue for or against any of Haugeland’s X-factor objections to the central thesis of cognitive science. 

3) Can machines give a damn?

4) Is indistinguishability from human behavior enough for intelligence? Why or why not? Is the imitation game fair?

5) Is the Lady Lovelace objection fatal to the possibility of artificial intelligence?

6) Can machines learn? Are learning machines autonomous?