Month: June 2014

Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis detail attempts to invent one:

What [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)] and [programmer Charles] Simonyi are hoping for is a complete paradigm shift. A programmer—and this could be anyone—would simply tell the computer what he needed in plain English, and the computer would figure out the rest. Anyone would be able to program, not just highly trained specialists, and, at least in principle, computers might ultimately produce much more reliable code than their human counterparts.

One big problem with this dream is “that computers still have too little understanding of how the external world works, and therefore too little understanding of how the programs they create will actually work”:

Consider, for example, this seemingly simple, hypothetical programming task: “Add a feature to Google Maps that allows a user to place a simulated boat on a river and have it float downstream.” To do this, you need to know what a river is, what a boat is, and what it means for a boat to float downstream. Any human programmer knows that, but no computer system has the real-world understanding of an average human being. As Tom Dean, a researcher at Google, told us, “Programming is [challenging for artificial intelligence] not because it requires concentration and attention to detail but because the path from the conception of what you want to accomplish to the realization of code that actually accomplishes it requires artistry, insight, and creativity as well as incredible mental dexterity.”

One day computers may have that kind of dexterity and intuition; the DARPA program is a good first step in that direction. But the path to the automated, thinking computer will also require a shift in research priorities, from the currently popular focus on the question “What you can do with Big Data?” back to A.I.’s original, driving one: “How do you build machines that are broadly intelligent?”

With the last weekend’s breakthrough being called into question, Brian Barrett argues that these days, the Turing test “isn’t so much a test of computer intelligence as it is human gullibility”:

A bad chatbot might luck its way to victory if the judges aren’t familiar with tell-tale signs of chatbot-ness. That’s usually of less importance when your panel includes experts in the field of computer science. In this case, it included an actor from Red Dwarf and a member of the House of Lords, both of whom are incredibly accomplished and by all indications brilliant minds, but not specifically trained in this field.

David Auerbach argues that “Eugene Goostman” did in fact pass the Turing test – but that the test itself has a fatal flaw:

Trashing the Reading results, Hunch CEO Chris Dixon tweeted, “The point of the Turing Test is that you pass it when you’ve built machines that can fully simulate human thinking.” No, that is precisely not how you pass the Turing test. You pass the Turing test by convincing judges that a computer program is human. That’s it. Turing was interested in one black-box metric for how we might gauge “human intelligence,” precisely because it has been so difficult to establish what it is to “simulate human thinking.” Turing’s test is only one measure.

So the Reading contest was not the travesty of the Turing test that Dixon claims. Dixon’s problem isn’t with the Reading contest – it’s with the Turing test itself. People are arguing over whether the test was conducted fairly and whether the metrics were right, but the problem is more fundamental than that.”Intelligence” is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. Statistician Cosma Shalizi has debunked the idea of any measurable general factor of intelligence like IQ. Nonetheless, the word exists, and so we search for some way to measure it. … The Turing test, famous as it is, is only one possible concrete measure of human intelligence, and by no means the best one.

Elizabeth Lopatto offers some background about how Turing turned imitating a conversation into a proxy for intelligence:

The strength of the test is obvious: “intelligence” and “thinking” are fuzzy words, and no definition from psychology or neuroscience has been sufficiently general and precise to apply to machines. The Turing test side steps the messy bits to provide a pragmatic framework for testing.

But this strength is also the test’s weakness. Turing at no point explicitly says that his test is meant to provide a measure of intelligence. For instance: human behavior isn’t necessarily intelligent behavior—take responding to an insult with anger. Or typos: normal and human, but intelligent?

Joseph Stromberg still believes the episode was noteworthy:

This announcement certainly doesn’t mean that self-aware robots are about to take over the world – and it doesn’t even mean that there’s one out there capable of consistently fooling people into thinking its a human. It does, however, mean that one has crossed the threshold Turing predicted would be passed by 2000, a meaningful milestone on the way to artificial intelligence.

That said, there are plenty more milestones that still need to be passed — even in terms of the Turing test. The Loebner prize, for instance, will award a silver medal for the first program to pass a text-only test, but a gold medal for one that passes an audio test — something that’s probably still a long way off.

But a less-charitable George Dvorsky makes the case that it’s time to abandon the “bullshit” Turing test:

Turing had no way of knowing that human conversation – or the appearance of it  – could be simulated by natural language processing (NLP) software and the rise of chatterbots. Yes, these programs exhibit intelligence — but they’re intelligent in the same way that calculators are intelligent. Which isn’t really very intelligent at all. More crucially, the introduction of these programs to Turing Test competitions fail to answer the ultimate question posed by the test: Can machines think?

Though impressive, and despite their apparent ability to fool human judges, these machines – or more accurately, software programs – do not think in the same way humans do. … It’s all smoke and mirrors, folks. There’s no thinking going on here – just quasi pre-programmed responses spouted out by sophisticated algorithms. But because Turing’s conjecture was directed at assessing the presence of human-like cognition in a machine, his test falls flat.

…is Reuven Rivlin. The former Knesset speaker and Likud party stalwart was elected yesterday. Dimi Reider, writing before the election, called Rivlin “the best president for the Left, for whom the Left will never vote”:

As a staunch right-winger, Rivlin is opposed to partition but is emphatically opposed to racism, coupling his opposition to a Palestinian state with support for offering Israeli citizenship to all Palestinians. While this is a stance being taken up by a number of right-wing politicians in recent years, Rivlin, as a democrat, goes one step further. When I interviewed him for Foreign Policy four years ago, for instance, he spoke nostalgically of a rotation-based executive espoused by Revisionist Zionists like Ze’ev Jabotinsky  – and held up by Belfast as one possible inspiration for a future of power-sharing. It’s a far cry from nationalist self-determination, or from the one state advocated by Palestinians and the pro-Palestinian Left. But it still offers infinitely more room for maneuver than anything ever plausibly offered or actually given to Palestinians by the centrist two-state Left.

What I take from this is that the two-state solution is dead and the project for Greater Israel continues apace. At some point, the Palestinian Arabs who would end the existence of a Jewish-majority state will be expelled, as they were in 1948. It’s hard to see any other outcome from the logic of one unitary Jewish state across the entire area that Israel has now controlled for the majority of its existence.  “But Rivlin is more than his opposition to a two-state solution,” Raphael Ahren stresses:

During his two terms as Knesset Speaker, he wasn’t afraid to confront the right wing — for example by opposing legislation he deemed as discriminatory and undemocratic, which won him many friends even among Israeli left-wingers. MKs Ilan Gilon (Meretz) and Shelly Yachimovich (Labor) voted for Rivlin, as did all four MKs from the Arab-Israeli Ra’am-Ta’al faction.

“He has an opinion on the two-state solution, but he is not widely seen as an ultra-nationalist,” said Mitchell Barak, a pollster and political analyst. “He’s one of voices of reason in Likud; he’s not a hothead like Danny Danon.” The president-elect’s views on the peace process are not born of hatred for Arabs, as his voting record and his statements as Knesset speaker attest, and the Arabs and the world at large know that, he said.

Comparing Rivlin to his predecessor Shimon Peres, Jonathan Tobin argues that his election indicates how Israeli public opinion on the peace process has shifted:

Rivlin’s win is one more demonstration that the center of Israeli politics is well to the right of where Americans would like it to be. While liberals and others who deride Netanyahu think the views of the popular Peres represent what most Israelis think, the experience of the last 20 years of the peace process have created a new political alignment that means Rivlin’s opinions don’t place him outside of the mainstream.

This is disconcerting for those who would like to believe that Peres, the architect of Oslo process, speaks for Israel in a way that Netanyahu cannot. But even if most Israelis think a two-state solution would be ideal, they know that in the absence of a true peace partner it isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

A little background on the Rivlins: The new president comes from a large and influential family who were among the first Jews to settle in Ottoman Palestine in the 19th century, making them, as Eetta Prince-Gibson calls them, “the closest thing to a Jewish aristocracy Israel has ever had”:

On their website (www.rivlinfamily.com), the clan claims to number today more than 50,000, of whom more than 35,000 are thought to live in Israel. The website lists some 195 people of note, including Yosef Yoel Rivlin, the author of the first Hebrew edition of the Koran (and father of Rueven Rivlin); Eliezer Rivlin, the deputy president of the Supreme Court of Israel from 2006 to 2012; Ranan R. Lurie, an American-Israeli political cartoonist and journalist; Rivka Michaeli, the doyenne of Israeli comedy; Sefi Rivlin, a wild-cat comedian and admired satirist, who died last year; Lilly Rivlin, an American feminist filmmaker and left-wing peace activist; Leora Rivlin, an award-winning actress, and Muki Tzur, from Kibbutz Ein Gev, a well-regarded historian of the period of the Second Aliyah.