Writing Assignment Week 12
In class, we discussed the Turing Test as a potential means for determining if something is intelligent. There are many "chatbots" online that can fool humans (this BBC article talks about some of them). Do you think that the Turing test is a good test for determining if someone (either person or computer) is intelligent? (Note: the question is asking whether the test in principle is a useful way to determine intelligence, not whether you'd be fooled by the specific chatbot in the article.) If so, why? If not, what are some drawbacks? What might be a better way to determine if a computer is intelligent?
No, I do not believe it is a good way of testing intelligence… for humans anyway. After reading the comical BBC article, it seems that several people are believing that this machine is human. However, there seems to be a pattern, the people believing in it are the people that are there as a dating service or there to “talk dirty”. I’m not saying that these people aren’t as smart, but it may reflect their intelligence only because it seems to be a pattern. Depending on how quickly “it” responds and what is has to say, I’m not sure if I’d fall for it or not. As far as it being a principle way to determine intelligence among a computer, I think it reflects the human who programmed it to be able to do it more than the computer itself. Now I’m not very computer savvy, and I do realize that a computer has to be very smart in order to be able to respond as a human but I don’t know who’s intelligence that would be reflecting, the computer? Or would it once again be the human?
I think a better way of judging a computer’s intelligence would be to see how much it can remember and reuse on its own without being programmed with certain automatic responses. After seeing the chatbot in class it seemed that it didn’t take very much to program a computer to answer a question with a question. That doesn’t seem like a way to judge a intelligence of a computer.
