Manhattan Mock Test RC Question: I have no idea what it means stilll
[#permalink]
Updated on: 05 Jul 2022, 11:17
Hi Everyone,
The text is below, but I still do not understand the implications or the example in paragraph 2 and then therefore 3. Can someone help me understand what the objection means? Thanks in advance.
In 1950, Alan Turing first published his famous Turing Test, a proposed means of determining whether a machine can “think.” Because of the difficulty in defining what it means to be able to “think,” or to demonstrate intelligence, Turing posed the question, “Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the [Turing Test]?” To enact the test, a human judge is placed in a natural-language conversation with both another human and a computer, but in a physically-removed way. For instance, the judge conducts a conversation with both subjects through text-based means, via a monitor and keyboard. If the judge cannot tell which is the human and which the computer, or if the judge incorrectly selects the computer as the human, then the computer has passed the test.
One of the commonly posed objections to the Turing Test is the "Black Box" objection: it is not sufficient for a machine to produce output indistinguishable from that of a human, because the fashion in which the output was produced is a relevant consideration. For instance, an English-speaking human without knowledge of the Chinese language could be sequestered in a room with a computer program that takes certain Chinese characters as input (e.g., a question) and produces other Chinese characters as output (e.g., an answer to the question). The human would be given instructions in English about how to run the computer program himself. If the human were then given a message written in Chinese characters, he could input the message and run the program in order to produce an output, also in Chinese characters. The human has produced a response but has not actually demonstrated an ability to understand, to respond, or even to think in Chinese. Turing’s response to this objection was that people base their judgments about whether humans can think entirely on their outward behavior, with no look at the "black box" inside their heads.
Another response to the Black Box objection, however, is that even if you can look inside the black box of a good artificial intelligence machine, the methods of language use may be very close indeed to human methods. Take, for example, the renowned Rassias method of language learning. A student learning Chinese would learn almost exclusively by memorizing dialogues. As he learns more words, he is able to replace words in various dialogue sentences with other words; he forms new sentences in accordance with a pattern. The memorization of more and more dialogues creates a “canon” such that the student can draw from memory a prepared sentence-form for any occasion. This canon simply grows larger and larger until the canon effectively becomes the language itself. This process is an advanced version of the patterned language usage of artificial intelligence programs.
Originally posted by
jerebearz on 04 Jul 2022, 14:30.
Last edited by
jerebearz on 05 Jul 2022, 11:17, edited 1 time in total.