Moore's Law states that technology will develop and progress, evolve in a way, exponentially. Humans on the other hand, and all animals for that matter, take many thousands of years to evolve. As a result, the Turing Test has been put in place to determine when a computer has reached the point of being "human". This test requires a judge to communicate with a computer and a human via an electronic interface and then decide which of the two is human. So how do we defend the essence of humanity from a computer? Brian Christian asks this question, and answers it.
"The apparent implication is that—because technological evolution seems to occur so much faster than biological evolution (measured in years rather than millennia)—once the Homo sapiens species is overtaken, it won’t be able to catch up. Simply put: the Turing Test, once passed, is passed forever. I don’t buy it."
Christian states that, "the human race got to where it is by being the most adaptive, flexible, innovative, and quick-learning species on the planet." Because of this, we will not let our computers become better at being...human...than we are.
What does this mean? Well, Christian proposes that what being a human is is not all about computing and logical thinking which has been focused on for generations. Instead we need to seek more balance in what we define being human as. While computers may be excelling at things that have been considered uniquely human, like complex calculations, they are failing at the basics of the human experience, "spatial orientation, object recognition, natural language, [and] adaptive goal-setting."
In order to stay ahead of the computers in the field of "being human" Christian suggests that we look at what really makes us human and work on improving on that. For example, we could improve on making personal connections with others and refrain from making connections that take no thought or effort in order to accomplish. This usually requires a thorough conversation with a lot of talking from both people. You cannot get to know someone if you are the only one talking. Christian proved this in the Turing Test of 2009 when he found that the computer Cleverbot's conversation only had 33 changes in speaker while Christian's conversation had 492.
So the next time you are talking with a friend, a family member, or anyone really, don't just communicate, connect. We are humans. That's what we do.
I think you did a great job of summarizing Brain Christian's whole article on discovering what makes us uniquely human. And although the point at which computers pass us intellectually isn't too far off in the future, I think humankind can have hope in the fact that it will take AI's far longer to learn the complicated social exchanges that we go through every day. Also, great job with the ending, I thought that it was pretty creative.
ReplyDeleteI think it is going to be interesting if we do indeed ever reconstruct the entire human brain, if whatever resulting machine will still funcition as a machine or if it will have some kind of more human behavior. I agree with your points, and I personally think this is the reason why true AI will never be developed. Still, it's interesting to think of the possibilities.
ReplyDelete