Variations On the Classic Turing Test 82
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on the different flavors of Turing Test being used by AI researchers to judge the human-ness of their creations. While some strive only to meet the 'appearance Turing Test' and build or animate characters that look human, others are investigating how robots can be made to elicit the same brain activity in a person as interacting with a human would."
Human-ness != Intelligence (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand people's fear of machine intelligence exceeding that of humans, but it is actually more dangerous to have machines merely mimicing human-ness than to have machines that are intelligent enough to actually understand what we say better than another human could.
That means more than merely having some mockery of mirror neurons for "empathy". It means genuine understanding: The ability to model.
The reason this is central to our relationship to our machines should be obvious: Friendly AI really boils down to the problem of effectively communicating our value systems to the AIs.
That's why natural language comprehension is the first step to friendly AI.
HENCE:
Re:Abstracting cognitive response is far off (Score:4, Insightful)
The Turing test is for apparent 'human' intelligence, where robotics adds communications via 'expressiveness'. These are two different vectors: rote intelligence and capacity to communicate (via body language, and the rest of linguistics/heuristics).
I don't think the body language is the hard part and that important considering the majority of human communication these days either involves just test or voice without seeing the other person. (That and certain persons can't interpret body language anyways)
The key problem with AI is:
Context
Context
Context
The number one failure that most Turing programs is that they only respond to the sentence you just said without any context to the conversation before hand. A really good AI would be able to keep on topic and understand what has been discussed previously so that they can expand on the topic without simply just responding to the current line.
There are several ways to achieve this, but right now I don't think there is any program out there that at least I know of that does this right. The easiest way to tell if you are talking to a chat bot is to refer to something previous in the conversation and see if they respond appropriately.