Fight the good fight. That’s what we all try to do, isn’t it? Stand up and fight, never surrender. It’s what makes us human. At least, that’s what author Lyda Morehouse expands on in her Big Idea for newest novel, Welcome to Boy.Net. Read on to see what exactly could make a computer “human.”
LYDA MOREHOUSE:
There’s been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence in the news lately. Congress is rushing to pass laws; artists, actors, and authors are freaking out for very reasonable and legitimate reasons; and everyone and their dog is trying to sell you some “AI enhanced” app or some such. But, when we say AI, what we really mean is highly-sophisticated machine learning. There isn’t a real intelligence behind this.
That being said, we don’t really know how to test for machine intelligence.
The Turing Test is the most famous way to try to determine if a machine is intelligent, but the weak point is, well… us. All a program has to do to pass the Turing Test is convince us of its humanity. And, I’m not saying we’re easily fooled, but, generally, as a species we enjoy anthropomorphizing things. Give me a cute enough mascot and a reasonable enough argument and I’d probably allow that spoons could be people. We love to give the benefit of the doubt. In fact, as early as 2016, Saudi Arabia of all places had already given a robot named Sophia citizenship, and all the human rights that entails.
So, in my mind, at least, the Turing Test is kind of an easy “A” for most of the current crop of machine learning programs out there.
When thinking about the far-future, I started to wonder what might replace the Turing Test. What is something that is so fundamentally human that it could be instantly recognizable as sentience, as a sign of intelligence?
My answer: resistance…
Welcome to Boy.Net: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo|Powell’s
Author socials: Website|Bluesky
Source: The Big Idea: Lyda Morehouse
Recent Comments