A scientific test should identify precisely what humans can do that computers cannot, avoiding subjective opinion: The “broken checkerboard” is not the ultimate scientific test for intelligence that we need. But it is a truly scientific test in the sense that it is capable of falsifying the theory that the mind is reducible to computation. Read More…
Artificial Intelligence
Eric Holloway: What’s hard for computers is easy for humans
We often hear that what’s hard for humans is easy for computers. But it turns out that many kinds of problems are exceedingly hard for computers to solve. This class of problems, known as NP-Complete (NPC), was independently discovered by Stephen Cook and Leonid Levin.
Eric Holloway: The Turing test is unscientific
Holloway: This test for intelligence, the Turing Test, was invented by and named after the mid-twentieth century computer pioneer Alan Turing. It is a subjective test in that it depends on whether an artificial intelligence is capable of convincing human testers that it is a human. But fooling humans, while impressive, is not really the same thing as actually possessing human-level intelligence.
Michael Egnor: Jeffrey Shallit, a computer scientist, doesn’t know how computers work
Egnor: It’s remarkable that Dr. Shallit—a professor of computer science—doesn’t understand computation. Materialism is a kind of intellectual disability that afflicts even the well-educated. To put it simply, machines don’t and can’t think. Dr. Shallit’s wristwatch doesn’t know what time it is.
Uploading ourselves into computers as a sort of religious vision
A tech writer suggests humans can escape Earth’s end by digitizing ourselves elsewhere in the galaxy.
Eric Holloway: A philosopher explains why thinking matter is impossible
Holloway: Richard Johns’s’ argument is deeper version of Captain Kirk’s scheme to defeat enemy robots in I, Mudd, a 1967 episode of Star Trek. Kirk posed a paradox that led to circuit meltdown.
Jonathan Bartlett on why we can’t upload our brains to computers
The idea that we can upload our brains to computers to avoid death shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between types of thinking.
Will AI replace scientists?
Jonathan Bartlett put that at #6 on his AI hype list
Jonathan Bartlett points out a key contradiction about “thinking robots” and “robot rights”
If we were able to make intelligent and sentient AIs, wouldn’t that mean we would have to stop programming them? It would be unethical for me to force you to do my will, so wouldn’t the same thing be true with AIs? [Not that it is ever going to happen, but… ]
Test: If naturalists are right, totalitarian states should be just as creative as free ones
A Chinese university is dumping intellectual freedom from their charters yet China hopes to be the world’s top AI power. Is there a contradiction here?
Would you prefer to be an immortal cyborg rather than a mortal human?
Would you give up your right arm for a robotic device that performs better? Think about it.
VIDEO: Digital unwrapping and reading of the En Gedi OT scroll
News has posted on this recent technological development. It is worth taking a couple of minutes to watch the video describing and imaging what was done using AI technologies: Fascinating, what 3-d scanning can do. It also of course corroborates the known result from the main Dead Sea Scroll finds, that the OT text was Read More…
Biblical archeology gets a boost from AI
As with the Dead Sea Scrolls, when they did decipher it, using AI, they found it was the same Scriptural texts as elsewhere. Which reinforces the fact that ancient peoples were not in the habit of simply rewriting the Scriptures now and then according to taste.
Is a merger with machines nearer—or impossible?
As Robert J. Marks put it, Non-algorithmic things (things that cannot be calculated), “cannot be uploaded.” Human consciousness, little as we understand it, appears to be one of those non-algorithmic things.
At Psychology Today: There are TWO hard problems of consciousness, not one
Psychology prof Gregg Henriques argues, consciousness “plays by a different set of rules than the language game of science.”