Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!utnut!utgpu!pindor
From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Bag the Turing test (was: Penrose and Searle)
Message-ID: <D0K9LC.Cx5@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <1994Dec8.000925.27355@oracorp.com> <3c7ckl$9i7@news1.shell>
Date: Fri, 9 Dec 1994 20:44:00 GMT
Lines: 49

In article <3c7ckl$9i7@news1.shell>, Hal <hfinney@shell.portal.com> wrote:
>>markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>>It's a fascinating question, how people would really react to intelligent
>>>TT passers.  I am going by what anti-AI writers claim they would do; 
>>>you're sure that faced with the real thing, their skepticism would vanish.
>>>That may be-- it's hard to believe that Searle has really tried to 
>>>picture to himself what passing the TT really means-- but this conclusion
>>>may be defeated by human prejudice.  Humans are ready enough to treat 
>>>other members of their species as less than human; why should we expect
>>>them to treat AIs any better?
>
>I have been searching out comparisons between refusal to accept the TT
>and racism.  Is this meant to be one?  Some people who are skeptical of
>the TT feel offended by these comparisons even when no one explicitly
>equates the two views.  They seem to be frequently linked rhetorically.
>Would you care to state what you see as the similarities and
>differences between the two?
>
One of the similarities is that often people would not admit racial 
predjudices and even be genuinely convinced that they do not have them, and
nevertheless such predjudices would be present in their subconsciousness and
influence their actions. The same is the often the case in scepticism towards
TT - many people find it subconsciously unacceptable that a "mere" machine
might be given such "human" attributes as .....(take your own pick). I am
not saying that this is always the case and that all critics of TT act out
of subconscious biases. However, if someone says "No, no, behavior is not
enough. I want to see what is inside", and asked "What will you be looking
for? What would you have to find to say *yes* or *no*?" reply "I do not
know, but I still want to look inside", then there is a very good chance
that they are just looking for reasons to say *no*. Even if they sincerely
think that they are trying to be fair. 
Reason behind comparison is to point out to certain psychological mechanisms
which make it difficult to objectively assess evidence in cases when 
conclusions might require revaluating deeply held (even if subconscious)
convictions, like superiority of a group one belongs to some other group
be it racial groups or "living" versus "non-living" things.
Once we realise strength of these mechanisms we might understand a need to
avoid evidence which is particularly prone to it, in particular if this 
evidence is not clear in any case (like "what the entity looks like").
 
>Hal Finney
>hfinney@shell.portal.com

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
