Dan Brown; Rev. Dodgson; Babbage; Turing

[JD]

It's all algorithms, just Man attempting to live up to some obscene
Gilgamesh complex.  I believe Beckett would have a rather interesting
discourse on the subject, if he were alive today,
feed-the-bowl-to-the-dog or stones-in-pocket or whatever recursive
shit.  There is a limit to which we can create, we can never supercede
our own selves simply because we are ourselves, and it's likely
impossible even to equal it since we're notoriously unable to
recognize even that which is before our eyes.  But man, what a
concept, wouldn't it be great?  Lots of CS majors making bank off of
AI these days, but it's gonna die away, hell, it's already died away
compared to 1999 or so.  Sure, a lot of crazy shit still comes out but
nothing like the grants that were being given back them.

On 2/5/07, David Casseres <david.casseres at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It's a mistake to read too much into the "Turing Test" of artificial
> intelligence.  It was proposed merely as an objective goal toward which
> computer engineers might strive, and was never thought to be a statement
> about human intelligence.  Today, no computer scientist doubts that the
> Turing Test can be satisfied, perhaps by existing computers, if someone
> spent the time to create the elaborate illusion required.
>
> There is considerable doubt that if the Test were satisfied, people would
> indeed regard it as the achievement of true artificial intelligence.  After
> all, it was once thought that if machines could play good chess, that would
> be "intelligence"; today they do play good chess and it's regarded as a
> pretty cool technical achievement, but not the real thing.
>
> On 2/4/07, Glenn Scheper <glenn_scheper at earthlink.net > wrote:
> > In his famous article "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in the
> British philosophical journal Mind, Turing had discussed the idea of a
> deterministic machine simulating human behaviour. If, he said, the machine
> could not be distinguished objectively from a human, then one would have to
> credit it with intelligence. This raises the existential question of whether
> or not humans are biological automata, whether death is the condition of a
> machine halting. Can mind exist without body? If so, in what manner? Turing
> had been fascinated by this since his childhood. He could find his answer
> only by first-hand experience. If this was not the primary motivation for
> Turing's suicide, it must at least have been in his mind when he bit into
> the apple. Turing's death served a dual purpose: it was an escape from
> social systems as well as a way of possibly answering the mind-body
> question.
>
>
>