Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!udel!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!psinntp!scylla!daryl
From: daryl@oracorp.com (Daryl McCullough)
Subject: Re: Bag the Turing test (was: Penrose and Searle)
Message-ID: <1994Dec11.161638.8222@oracorp.com>
Organization: Odyssey Research Associates, Inc.
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 1994 16:16:38 GMT
Lines: 110

jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>Daryl McCullough <daryl@oracorp.com> wrote:
>
>>>The people who say they wouldn't be convinced by a computer that
>>>passes the Turing Test are just not being honest with themselves. 
>
>Why can't skeptics about the TT just be wrong? Why "not honest
>with themselves"?  The suggestion, here as in many other instances,
>seems to be that no one could have good reasons for being skeptical.

No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm simply making a prediction about
human psychology: Faced with an actual, Turing-Test passing robot, I
believe most people will accept it as conscious, in spite of their
reservations about machine intelligence. I'm willing to bet that you
would, also, if you had had a sufficiently in-depth, meaningful,
insightful conversation with this TT-passing robot.

It is easy to be skeptical about all sorts of things in the abstract,
whether the world is real, or just a hallucination, whether anyone
besides myself is conscious. However, it's hard to live your life with
such skepticisms.

I think that you and Searle are not trying sufficiently hard to
imagine what it would be like to have TT-passing robots around. Since
their input-output relation is indistinguishable from a human's, there
is no reason that these robots couldn't become judges, or teachers, or
playwrites, etc. As such robots became more and more common, you would
find yourself forced occasionally to interact with them. Inevitably,
you would find that enjoy some particular robot's sense of humor (or
at least what appears to be a sense of humor), and you would arrange
to spend more time talking to it. In your conversations, you might
start to talk about philosophy, or moral issues, or politics. You
might on Christmas, or on birthdays (or the anniversary of the robot's
manufacture) give each other interesting books to read, because you
are interested in hearing the robot's opinion, and
vice-versa. (Whether or not you believe that a robot can possess an
opinion, you can still appreciate the words that the robot uses.)
Gradually, you and the robot become what would be called friends
if the robot were *really* intelligent.

Eventually, you would find that in your actions, and in your thoughts
the distinction between *really* intelligent (and conscious) beings
and your robot friend will seem less and less important. You may still
occasionally express your opinion that your robot friend is not really
intelligent, but it bothers you so much to witness the robot's (faked,
you believe) hurt feelings and sulking that you express these opinions
less and less frequently. Maybe you and the robot will eventually come
to an agreement that maybe electronic computers *are* intelligent, and
it is those new-fangled light-based computers that you both have doubts
about.

If we grant the possibility of Turing-Test passing robots, what in
this scenario is unbelievable? What in this scenario depends on *how*
the robot produces its output?

>>>It's is one thing to give intellectual, Searle-style arguments as to why a
>>>hypothetical TT-passing program doesn't really understand, and it is
>>>quite another to actually *meet* such a program, and dismiss it. I am
>>>willing to bet that there is not a single person on this newsgroup who
>>>would not come to accept a program as intelligent and conscious if the
>>>program were capable of carrying on a lively, insightful discussion
>>>about politics, morality, love, family and artificial intelligence.
>
>Whether I would accept it or not would depend on what else I knew
>about the program and on what had been discovered about consciousness, 
>programming, etc, between now and when I meet this program.

I think you are wrong about that. Just as you accept that other humans
are conscious without any theory of consciousness, I think you would
accept a robot as conscious.

>>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.
>
>Well, there are a number of cases we might imagine.  For instance,
>Daryl McCullough comes to me and says "Guess what, Jeff, I've
>developed this great program that passes the TT, and here's how
>it works: ...".  Now, maybe after hearing this I would think
>"Of course!  That would produce consciousness, understanding, etc.
>Why did no one think of it before?"

The scenario I'm imagining is that someday a robot comes up to you and
says "Guess what, Jeff? I'm a robot that passes the Turing Test, and I
want to discuss with you why you don't accept me as conscious."

>Anyway, in that case I might well give it the benefit of the doubt.
>But I don't think that's the only case worth considering.

Well, it is the only case that I find believable. I don't find it
believable that you would *not* give it the benefit of the doubt.

>>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?
>
>That's true, but there's also a prejudice that works the other way.
>There's a strong tendency to see understanding, consciousness, etc
>behind any sensible (and even not so sensible) use of words.

Exactly. I think that everyone has both kinds of prejudice. However,
I believe that the one kind of prejudice (against believing in another's
personhood) comes to the fore in abstract discussions, while the second
kind of prejudice (in favor of believing that anything that acts like
it's intelligent *is* intelligent) comes to the fore in actual practice.

Daryl McCullough
ORA Corp.
Ithaca, NY
