But I'm against it. As far as I can tell it's quite serious.
And yet I can see the appeal of it.
As a certain ex-President would say: Sad!
I don’t quite know what to make of this
17 responses to “I don’t quite know what to make of this”
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That is so creepy. Of course, a lot of people have grown up watching movies and TV series with AI characters. They probably have been waiting for it.
AMDG -
No doubt. The syndrome goes way back to the mid-1960s, when Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called ELIZA which simulated, in a way that seems pretty crude and obvious now, conversation. He was alarmed when people began to get attached to it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA -
How do I know you aren’t a robot?
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That sounds like a question a robot would ask.
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I am coincidentally reading a novel by Ian McEwan titled Machines Like Me which takes place in an alternate Britain of 1982 where they lose the Falklands War and Alan Turing lives on. As a result of that (Alan Turing, not the war) there are now AIs that can be purchased. A third of the way in I’m enjoying it quite a bit though the reviews are not great. We’ll see where it ends up.
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Oh, and the Beatles have reformed and recorded another album, as an aside. Which I suppose means that John Lennon avoided his fate.
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So is this a grown-up’s version of an imaginary friend, one that actually does talk back to you? Quite apart from the creepiness, the basic premise seems wrong to me–that I can create the perfect friend for me. Part of what makes a good friend is that our differences give us opportunities to make each other better, and I can’t predict which differences will do that.
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I would think that the bot has more “freedom” than that. It probably has a certain amount of independence, in the sense of doing more than just responding directly. Not that that makes your point any less valid.
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In fact it makes it worse—a more convincing illusion.
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Every day it gets more difficult for me to argue with my wife that we can’t know we’re in the end times…
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I have never gone in for that sort of thing, but I have to say, sometimes I really wonder….
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Speaking of Alan Turing, and ELIZA: ELIZA actually passed the Turing Test. And that was 50 years ago. Though I don’t think it was quite legit because the person talking to “her” didn’t know, just assumed (iirc). There’s now an ongoing effort to build AIs that truly can pass the test–i.e. the person knows that it’s a test and that the entity on the other end may or may not be an AI and has to decide from the conversation. There was an article in the Atlantic a while back (5-10 years?) in which the writer participated in one of these and maybe was wrong, but I can’t remember for sure.
I don’t think the computing landscape would have been greatly different if Turing had lived, btw. Really convincing AI requires hardware that just didn’t exist ca 1980. So no matter how skilled he was at software he couldn’t have done much more than was actually done at the time.
Beatles reunion ca 1983 probably would have been a disappointment. I mean, that’s the way it went with most of the big ’60s musicians–a brilliant 5, maybe at most 10, years, then mediocrity. -
I sometimes think libertarians or objectivists can be described as people who would have to study for the Turing test.
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Then again, I feel like I might have to brush up a bit myself…
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:-):-)
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Very disturbing
Light On Dark Water 
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