Truly understanding programming

Posted Jul 24, 2024 18:27 UTC (Wed) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375)
In reply to: Truly understanding programming by somlo
Parent article: Imitation, not artificial, intelligence

>However, true intelligence isn't when the Turing machine can make *you* believe it's intelligent. Rather, it happens when the machine thinks to *itself* that it is intelligent -- the whole Descartes "cogito ergo sum" thing).

I'm glad you're happy with that state of play; I'm not, a web page has a reference to itself and almost any program more complicated will do too, so almost any more-complicated machine intelligence will parrot "cogito ergo sum" so I figure this is another case of "GOTO considered harmful." The more I'm asked to credit machinery and animals with smarts, the more I find: social and tool-using corvids who also train their young to recognise helpful and harmful humans, orcas in pods training and sustaining their young while attacking, ants collectively finding optimal paths, primates (and dogs and cats) learning sign language... there's more intelligence in the world than our culture can give credit to. Which brings to the next point, if we're not giving credit to animal intelligence, how are we going to spot machine intelligence emerging from our computer systems?

>As to how *we* get to test for that, I don't think science has that figured out yet... :)
I think this is backwards. The question is one that the applicant for personhood asks us and our scientists: "What do I have to do so you will treat me like a person?"

K3n.