Turing presented his new offering in the form of a thought experiment, based on a popular Victorian parlor game. A man and a woman hide, and a judge is asked to determine which is which by relying only on the texts of notes passed back and forth. Turing replaced the woman with a computer. Can the judge tell which is the man? If not, is the computer conscious? Intelligent? Does it deserve equal rights?It's impossible for us to know what role the torture Turing was enduring at the time played in his formulation of the test. But it is undeniable that one of the key figures in the defeat of fascism was destroyed, by our side, after the war, because he was gay. No wonder his imagination pondered the rights of strange creatures.
technology computers gay homosexuality artificial-intelligence ai
Forget UNIX - it will be gone in 5 years.
funny humor technology computers
Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?.. Information is alienated experience.
information technology computers internet
A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits. But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants. But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith.
But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.
technology computers artificial-intelligence ai
The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.
Asking whether computers can think is like asking if submarines can swim.
computers thinking
I really didn't foresee the Internet. But then, neither did the computer industry. Not that that tells us very much of course--the computer industry didn't even foresee that the century was going to end.
computers internet 21st-century
Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web's outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal.
computers internet
Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style- everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.
architecture computers nerds
Asked about the fact that Apple's iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It's like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.
computers biography mac windows
Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.
computers persistence
About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
computers people
Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. And look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.
computers people thetimes time
Google is working on self-driving cars, and they seem to work. People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better.
car computers people work self
People are so bad at driving cars that computers don't have to be that good to be much better. Any time you stand in line at the D.M.V. And look around, you're like, Oh, my God, I wish all these people were replaced by computer drivers.
car computers people thetimes time
We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people.
opportunity computers people thetimes time
It always helps to be a good programmer. It is important to like computers and to be able to think of things people would want to do with their computers.
computers people help
One of the biggest challenges we had in the first decade was not that many people had personal computers. There weren't that many people to sell to, and it was hard to identify them.
computers challenge people
One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible.
You can involve yourself in electronics, computers, puzzles.. There's a lot of creativity and brain working. There's a lot to model trains that people don't realize.
Another little known fact about Amazing Tennis - the computer opponents are modeled after real people. In an odd turn of events, I joined a division 3 college tennis team at age 38.
computers age people
Some people may have noticed the new computer shelf at the anchor desk. Rather than phone calls, we want to take real time e-mails, and we'll be starting that very soon.
You have to wait for people to program you. The only difference is the amount of people that you're going to reach but that's going to even out in the next two or three years anyway. Computers are being bought faster than televisions right now.
rights computers people
It's interesting to see what people are saying about me. I like keep up with the latest rumors! A while back there was a rumor that I was going to do a film with Demi Moore about the takeover of Commodore computers!
Showing 401 to 425 of 929 results
You must log in to post a comment.
There are no comments yet.