Computing Machinery And Intelligence Quotes

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time' (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory.

It is not possible to produce a set of rules purporting to describe what a man should do in every conceivable set of circumstances.

The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction.

Can machines think?"... The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B... We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?

Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can "inject" an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "sub critical," i.e. to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are supercritical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals’ minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?

For a few years after he wrote “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Turing seemed to enjoy engaging in the fray that he provoked. With wry humor, he poked at the pretensions of those who prattled on about sonnets and exalted consciousness. “One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other ‘My little computer said such a funny thing this morning!’ ” he japed in 1951.

We like to believe that Man is in some subtle way superior to the rest of creation. It is best if he can be shown to be necessarily superior, for then there is no danger of him losing his commanding position.

Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient computers below the city, a single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It held its increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and may have held them for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery that maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelligence had awakened in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as a ghost, to stumble through the hallways of the dead. In other words, Blaine the Mono was preparing to get out of Dodge.

Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do. One could say that a man can “inject” an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be “sub-critical,” i.e. to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are supercritical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole “theory” consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals’ minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, “Can a machine be made to be super-critical?

La opinión tan generalizada de que los científicos proceden siempre de un hecho bien demostrado a otro hecho bien demostrado, y nunca se dejan influir por una conjetura no probada, es bastante errónea. A condición de que quede bien claro qué son hechos probados y qué son conjeturas, no existe ningún peligro. Las conjeturas son de suma importancia, porque sugieren posibles vías de investigación.

But we're not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle. Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter. Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind.

Thiel, the PayPal cofounder who had invested in SpaceX, holds a conference each year with the leaders of companies financed by his Founders Fund. At the 2012 gathering, Musk met Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist, video-game designer, and artificial intelligence researcher with a courteous manner that conceals a competitive mind. A chess prodigy at age four, he became the five-time champion of an international Mind Sports Olympiad that includes competition in chess, poker, Mastermind, and backgammon. In his modern London office is an original edition of Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which proposed an “imitation game” that would pit a human against a ChatGPT–like machine. If the responses of the two were indistinguishable, he wrote, then it would be reasonable to say that machines could “think.” Influenced by Turing’s argument, Hassabis cofounded a company called DeepMind that sought to design computer-based neural networks that could achieve artificial general intelligence. In other words, it sought to make machines that could learn how to think like humans.

Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient computers below the city, a single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It had held its increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and might have held them for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery which had maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelligence had awakened in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as any ghost, to stumble through the halls of the dead. In other words, Blaine the Mono was preparing to get out of Dodge.

Educability, then, is the principal ingredient of intelligence—which means that in order to be called intelligent, machines must show that they are capable of learning. The fourth objection—“that intelligence in machinery is merely a reflection of that of its creator”—can thus be countered by recognizing its equivalence to “the view that the credit for the discoveries of a pupil should be given to his teacher. In such a case the teacher would be pleased with the success of his methods of education, but would not claim the results themselves unless he had actually communicated them to his pupil.” The student, on the other hand, can be said to be showing intelligence only once he has leaped beyond mere imitation of the teacher and done something that is at once surprising and original, as the infant Gauss did. But what kind of machine would be able to learn in this sense? [...] Indeed, at this point in the report, one begins to get the sense that Turing’s ambition is as much to knock mankind off its pedestal as to argue for the intelligence of machines. What seems to irk him, here and elsewhere, is the automatic tendency of the intellectual to grant to the human mind, merely by virtue of its humanness, a kind of supremacy.