Where's HAL 9000? 269
An anonymous reader writes "With entrants to this year's Loebner Prize, the annual Turing Test designed to identify a thinking machine, demonstrating that chatbots are still a long way from passing as convincing humans, this article asks: what happened to the quest to develop a strong AI? 'The problem Loebner has is that computer scientists in universities and large tech firms, the people with the skills and resources best-suited to building a machine capable of acting like a human, are generally not focused on passing the Turing Test. ... And while passing the Turing Test would be a landmark achievement in the field of AI, the test’s focus on having the computer have to fool a human is a distraction. Prominent AI researchers, like Google’s head of R&D Peter Norvig, have compared the Turing Test’s requirement that a machine fools a judge into thinking they are talking to a human as akin to demanding an aircraft maker constructs a plane that is indistinguishable from a bird."
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea (Score:4, Informative)
I'm not. AI is to real intelligence what margarine is to butter - it's artificial. It isn't real. You're never going to get a Turing computer to actually think, although some future chemical or something machine may.
However, you could get to the point where intelligence was simulated well enough that it appeard to be sentient. [wikipedia.org]
Which leads to what I fear, that people like those in PETA will start a "machine rights" movement, where it may be illegal for me to shut off a machine I built myself!
Luckily, I'm not likely to live long enough to see it. Some of you might, though.
Where's HAL9000 (Score:3, Informative)
He's here: https://twitter.com/HAL9000_ [twitter.com]