Artificial Intelligence and Humanity I

This post was based and inspired on the writings of Brian Christian

Turing test

The objective of the Turing test, created by Alan Turing in the year 1950, consists in evaluating during small conversations, if computers could imitate humans. The test incited the creation of Chatterbots such as ELIZA, launched on 1966. Later on the Loebner prize was created, offering a monetary award for the first chatterbot that could pass the test, this competition still takes place once a year.

The classic Turing test consists in one room with judges that make questions for 5 minutes to computers or to humans that are in a second room. After conversations take place judges reveal which chats they think they had with chatterbots and which with humans. The chatterbot that is considered the best is the one that fools the higher percentage of judges. Turing believed that the test would have been passed by the year 2000; far from his prediction a new record that was able to deceive only 30% of the judges was recently achieved.

Controversy

The principal question Turing wanted to solve with this test end up generating lots of controversy because it derivated mainly in three others "Can machines think?", "Are machines intelligent?", "Do machines have a conscience?" Lots of arguments where stated in favor and against them (including the ones that follow), but no unanimous conclusion was reached:

• How we could tell if a machine was intelligent. After all, mankind has tried to define intelligence for ages and had made little progress except to decide that whatever it is, we've got it.
• How do you know if the machine actually understands what it is doing, seeing, or saying? A particularly strange side effect of being a conscious being is that you can never truly know that someone other than you is conscious.
• Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is not only to write it but know that it had written. Neither until they can feel an emotion (Jefferson).
• Computers can’t originate anything we explicitly tell them to do (Lovelace).

My preferred theory concludes that machines can't think; I argue that thinking cannot be separated from feelings (Damasio) and that it also includes an intuitive component.

Questions and thoughts

• Do things have an essence, and if so is it possible to describe it? (Like Plato did in the Allegory of the Cave)?
• What makes something to be something? We guide ourselves mostly by external appearances and actions. But indeed I think the evaluation would be more accurate if we compare that something internal structure and organization.
• Can we extend the meaning of consciousness? By adding an exception to inanimate objects that does not include the act of thinking, emotions, intuition or any other aspect of the brain, in this case being conscious would mean only to have knowledge of their own existence.
• Our brains consider that a certain entity is or is not something often by doing lots of assumptions. Instead we could assign a degree of credibility of what we think the entity is.

Metaphor and the Mind

Philosophers have long wondered about the connection between metaphor and thought:

• "We believe that we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, and flowers, he wrote, and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things, metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities". - Niezche

• "Inevitable clash of metaphors in all writing shows only too well that language may subvert or exceed an author's intended meaning". - Derrida

• "A metaphor is often indispensable to express a concept (or meaning) for which words just do not exist in the language. Entire domains (spheres of knowledge such as anatomy and psychology) are mapped in other domains for lack of appropriate words". - Michel Breal

• "Metaphors are markers of the roots of thought itself. They are the main mechanisms through which we comprehend abstract concepts and perform abstract reasoning. Abstract thought would be meaningless without bodily experience. People think with their brains and their brains are part of their bodies as well". - Lakoff and Johnson

• "I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath - not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself". - Steven Pinker

When we say someone is a warm person, we do not mean that they are running a fever. When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. These phrases are metaphorical-they use concrete objects and qualities to describe abstractions like kindness or importance, we use them so often that we hardly notice them.

Nowadays cognitive scientists have begun to see the basic metaphors that we use all the time not just as turns of phrase, but as keys to the structure of thought. By taking these everyday metaphors as literally as possible, psychologists are upending traditional ideas of how we learn, reason, and make sense of the world around us.

They also suggest that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern our body’s interactions with its physical environment. Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies. “The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought” says John Bargh.

Several studies about the relation between body and metaphor have been done, in one of them subjects were asked to hold a cup of either iced or hot coffee, not knowing it was part of the study, then a few minutes later asked to rate the personality of a person who was described to them. The hot coffee group, it turned out, consistently described a warmer person--rating them as happier, more generous, and more caring - than the iced coffee group. The effect seems to run the other way also.

Research about “where metaphor is grounded” is also being performed. It shows that It is not grounded in logic, nor in literary theory. There is no purely literal language in terms of which metaphor may be evaluated and objectively assessed. In the fields ranging from cognitive psychology to social anthropology, metaphors are currently subject to extensive analysis, but the findings can only be partial, and relative to the discipline involved. What is becoming clearer is that metaphors - like linguistic theory - are rooted in the beliefs, practices and intentions of language users.