The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human. Many think that Turing’s proposal for intelligence, especially creativity, has been proven inadequate. Is the Lovelace test a better alternative? What are the capabilities and limitations of AI? Robert J. Marks and Dr. Selmer Bringsjord discuss the Turing test, the Lovelace test, and the limitations of artificial intelligence. They also talk about Kurt Gödel’s mathematical proof of the existence of God. Is Gödel’s proof valid?

Show Notes

• 0:00:54 | Introducing Selmer Bringsjord, Professor — Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI)
• 0:01:49 | What is the Turing test?
• 0:04:03 | The Lovelace objection
• 0:04:29 | Ada Lovelace
• 0:07:51 | The consciousness objection
• 0:09:00 | Eugene Goostman
• 0:09:42 | The Lovelace test
• 0:13:54 | AlphaGo’s “creative” move
• 0:16:48 | Creative writing
• 0:18:17 | Has the Lovelace test been passed?
• 0:21:35 | How could it be proven that the Lovelace test was passed?
• 0:25:08 | Ray Kurzweil and singularity
• 0:26:30 | Can computers fake all human behaviors?
• 0:27:12 | Can computers duplicate all human behaviors?
• 0:28:21 | Subjective measurement
• 0:29:46 | The definition of cognition
• 0:34:01 | Is consciousness is a special case of cognition?
• 0:38:28 | Are consciousness and cognition non-algorithmic?
• 0:40:00 | Examples of cognition that are not computable
• 0:46:45 | Will AI ever write creative prose?
• 0:50:08 | The need for characters
• 0:51:17 | The mechanics of writing and Proust
• 0:53:23 | The complexity of language
• 0:56:48 | AI and financial reports
• 0:59:43 | Sports reporting
• 1:02:55 | Paper generators (Sci-Gen, MathGen)
• 1:04:27 | Recognizing AI generated content
• 1:09:37 | A book about Kurt Gödel
• 1:10:59 | Gödel’s “God Theorem”
• 1:13:06 | Was Gödel a deist?
• 1:15:37 | The history of Gödel’s proof
• 1:21:53 | The reasoning behind Anselm’s ontological proof

Gödel’s Ontological Proof

Additional Resources

• Selmer Bringsjord’s website
• The Turing test at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Ada Lovelace at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Charles Babbage at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Bringsjord, Selmer, Paul Bello, and David Ferrucci. “Creativity, the Turing test, and the (better) Lovelace test.” The Turing Test. Springer, Dordrecht, 2003. 215-239. Link: http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/SELPAP/REPRINTS/LOVELACE/lovelace.pdf
• Eugene Goostman at Wikipedia
• AlphaGo at Wikipedia
• Ray Kurzweil
• David Gelernter at Wikipedia
• What Robots Can and Can’t Be by Selmer Bringsjord
• Bringsjord, Selmer, and Michael Zenzen. “Cognition is not computation: The argument from irreversibility.” Synthese 113, no. 2 (1997): 285-320.
• Claude Shannon at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Bringsjord, Selmer, and David Ferrucci. Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity: Inside the Mind of BRUTUS, a Storytelling Machine. Psychology Press, 1999.
• Marcel Proust at Wikipedia
• Ex Machina at IMDB
• “Artificial Intelligence Can Now Write Amazing Content — What Does That Mean For Humans?” at Forbes
• “What News-Writing Bots Mean for the Future of Journalism” at WIRED
• “The First Novel Written by AI Is Here—and It’s as Weird as You’d Expect It to Be” at SingularityHub
• Generate a random Computer Science paper using SCIGen
• Generate a random Math paper using MathGen
• “Belletristic” definition at Dictionary.com
• “The Argument for God’s Existence from AI” by Selmer Bringsjord
• The Gödel solution at Wikipedia
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Saint Anselm of Canterbury at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Rene Descartes at Encyclopædia Britannica
• “On the Logic of the Ontological Argument” by Paul Oppenheimer and Edward Zalta
• Disjunctive syllogism at Wikipedia