Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bu-cs!buengc!bph
From: bph@buengc.BU.EDU (Blair P. Houghton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Defining Machine Intelligence.
Message-ID: <1655@buengc.BU.EDU>
Date: 11 Dec 88 19:00:33 GMT
References: <484@soleil.UUCP> <4216@homxc.UUCP> <401@uwslh.UUCP> <1111@dukeac.UUCP> <404@uwslh.UUCP> <713@quintus.UUCP> <405@uwslh.UUCP> <622@htsa.uucp> <42361@linus.UUCP> <408@uwslh.UUCP> <42835@linus.UUCP>
Reply-To: bph@buengc.bu.edu (Blair P. Houghton)
Followup-To: comp.ai
Organization: Boston Univ. Col. of Eng.
Lines: 27

In article <42835@linus.UUCP> bwk@mbunix (Barry Kort) writes:
>
>I would be convinced if, upon acquiring language skills, the intelligent
>machine unexpectedly uttered the assertion, "I am."

It's unfortunately remarkable that there are very few humans who understand
what you mean by this, many fewer who are capable of proving it to themselves
without once seeing it done.

We've been around for a few million years, and it was only DesCartes in the
past 150 years who figured out the concise method of verifying
self-existence.

Your test is more a demonstration of exemplary intelligence than just a
proof of intelligence.  It would certainly convince me, too; but I would
be convinced by something less.  Like if somebody took one of Sejnowski's
speech-synthesizers, fed it morally slanted sentences in training, then
fed it a morally slanted sentence it had never seen, with gaps in the
moral content, and it got the right word in the gap.  That, to me, would
seem intelligent.

Don't ask me what "intelligence" is.  I've got enough trouble defining
resistors in Magic extractions.

				--Blair
				  "Whaddya mean, 'one node is
				   two nodes'?"