Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagChinese Room experiment

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Laptop illustration with file drawer, data stores concept, blue background. Generative AI

AI and the Chinese Room Argument

We still haven't cracked the mystery of human intelligence.

One of the most well-known criticisms of AI is John Searle’s Chinese room argument. Published in 1980, the argument asks the reader to imagine himself a librarian in a large library full of books. These books are full of rules that convert one string of Chinese characters into another string of Chinese characters. Each day the librarian is given a paper with some Chinese characters on it, and he then looks through his books to convert the characters into a response. Throughout the whole process, the librarian does not know what any of the characters mean. He is just following rules by rote. Searle states that just as the librarian in the room has the ability to translate Chinese without Read More ›

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Robot typing on keyboard

Does Passing the Turing Test Guarantee We’ve Created True AI?

A true test of AI will be able to distinguish between AI and human intelligence.
AI might give us impressive answers to our questions. But that doesn’t mean they have a humanlike understanding of what is going on. Read More ›
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white man mannequin with broken crack reflection mirror in crime or violence scene

The “Conscious Machine” Is Just Real Enough to Scare People

The ancient Greek hunk Narcissus could tell us about the risks — if he hadn’t been turned into a daffodil…

Theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart turns to an ancient folk tale to explain the danger of coming to believe that artificial intelligence is real human intelligence. Narcissus, as he tells us, was a young Greek hunter who fell in love with his own reflection in still water. He was entranced by the image but frustrated by the fact that it never did anything he didn’t do himself. He pined away and was eventually transformed into a flower — still called narcissus today. His name also found its way into psychology as a term for extreme self-absorption, narcissism. And that’s where Dr. Hart fears that an attraction to AI products as “machine selves” is taking us. While we’ve always been Read More ›

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Künstliche Intelligenz Konzept

Oxford’s John Lennox Busts the “Computer Takeover” Myth

AI is here to stay, he says, but in addition to doing a great deal of good, it raises vast problems we must address

Earlier this month, we looked at claims that robots are going to scarf up everyone’s jobs. That was a bonus feature in the Science Uprising series. In another bonus interview, “John Lennox on the Transhumanist Claim AI Will Turn Humans into Gods” (October 17, 2022), Oxford mathematician Lennox talks about claims that 1) computers are taking over and that 2) we will merge with them (transhumanism). Lennox is the author of 2084: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity (2020). This is the first of two parts, where he talks mainly about narrow AI but then gets into the topic of artificial general intelligence (AGI). A partial transcript and notes follow: John Lennox: The typical AI system consists of a Read More ›

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Marks: Computers Only Compute and Thinking Needs More Than That

Robert J. Marks talks about his new book, Non-Computable You, with Oregon-based talk show host Bill Meyer

Recently, Bill Meyer interviewed Walter Bradley Center director Robert J. Marks on his Oregon-based talk show about “Why computers will never understand what they are doing,” in connection with his new book, Non-Computable You: What You Do That Artificial Intelligence Never Will (Discovery Institute Press, 2022). We are rebroadcasting it with permission here as (Episode 194). Meyer began by saying, “I started reading a book over the weekend that I am going to continue to eagerly devour because it cut against some of my preconceived notions”: https://mindmatters.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/07/Mind-Matters-194-Bob-Marks-Bill-Meyer.mp3 A partial transcript, notes,  and Additional Resources follow. Meyer and Marks began by discussion the recent flap at Google where software engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that the AI he was working with was Read More ›