Post #3789575

Note to self: Alan Turing was wrong. But not for the reasons you may think. He proposed the "Turing test" - if a conversation with a machine cannot be differentiated from a conversation with a human, it is reasonable - Turing said - to attribute intelligence to it. Turns out we have machines you can talk to now, and humans *regularly* mistake them for reasoning, and they're not only not thinking, they're often wrong. But this isn't about them. It's about us. We see bunnies in the clouds and faces in wallpaper, and now it turns out we're dismally horrible at judging if the other side of a conversation is actually thinking, or is just pattern matching. We have found the problem, and it is us. Might a computer actually think? Maybe, someday. And it does a damn good job of emulating it now. Good enough for many purposes. But - the mental model isn't there, at least in Turing-test levels of conversation. We mostly can't tell if a computer is thinking, because it's "easy" to fake now and we're gullible and optimistic.