Turing, AI and ESP

[Paul Mackin]

On Thu, 30 Dec 1999, Seb Thirlway wrote:

> I've been following this discussion, and can't say I've followed
> precisely enough to butt into a particular post and refute
> it...but, backtracking a great deal, I don't really buy Turing's
> ESP argument at all.

I don't need to tell anyone I don't either. I think we would be well 
advised to question how seriously Turing himself took it. I don't know if
anyone yet has quoted the statement from the article as to T's own beliefs
and prediction on the question of whether machines can think, so I will do
so for the record:

"Consider first the more accurate from of the question. I believe that
in about fifty years' time it will be posible to program computers,
with a storage capacity of about 10 [to the 9th power], to make them play
the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have
more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five
minutes of questioning. The original question, "Can machines think" I
believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless 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 . . . "

Turing gave this as his belief and prediction. He didn't say this
WOULD BE his prediction if it were not for ESP.  Moreover, the
discussion at the very end of the article on the ESP objection, including
the statement "The argument to my mind is quite a strong one" and
his ticking off of several alarming and a bit outlandish possibilities of
how ESP might throw off the success of his prediction, has struck at
least two experts (Hodges and Hofstader/Dennett) as possibly having been
in some part jest. For me T's final suggestion of conducting what became
known as the Turing Test in a "telepathy-proof room" is the clincher.

None of this is to say that Turing was not alarmed by even the possibility
of ESP--not for what it would to his prediction but what it would do to
the very foundations of science. 
				
		P.