Who knows?

In a long and thoughtful essay inspired by his work as a teacher, Julian Waldner also touches on the Turing test and its limitations.

What is fascinating about Turing’s Test is not it’s astuteness as a test for machine intelligence; I am not alone in finding it unsatisfying. The philosopher John Searle famously threw down the gauntlet against Turing’s Test with his Chinese Room thought experiment. Searle imagines a room with a man locked away inside. The man is fed statements in Chinese through a small slot in the locked door. Although the man speaks only English and does not understand a word of Chinese, he has access to a giant book of rules. This book of rules allows the man to infallibly translate the Chinese statements and produce completely flaunt Chinese responses to be fed back out of the room. This procedure allows the man to produce Chinese statements, without understanding a word of Chinese. Searle’s point is that Artificial Intelligence produces the correct response through the mindless manipulation of symbols, without understanding what those symbols mean.

Turing’s test has left something out by design. The Turing Test, like the scientific project as a whole, has simply bracketed the question of understanding or consciousness to focus instead on what can be measured: We can’t touch consciousness or see understanding, but we can distinguish between something that looks like the product of intelligence and something that doesn’t. The fascinating thing about the Turing Test is that it still functions, even seven decades later, as a definition of what Artificial Intelligence is. Whether we are talking about Google Maps giving you a route that works, Claude generating text, a Tesla navigating through a busy street, your iPhone recognizing your face, or Spotify recommending songs—the goal is always to produce the kind of outputs that intelligent minds would.

Alan Turing himself was a distinctive intellect. Even aside from being gay and suicidal, he was one of those British eccentrics who enrich the world's cultural life now and again. But it's fair to say he had blind spots as well. Left brain types in a number of fields have a tendency to reduce all mental processes to a matter of processing power. Ted Chiang's short story "Understand" depicts a man who is treated for anoxia with a drug that regenerates his neurons, and it winds up turning him superhuman. Entertaining, but dubious. The engineers and investors who have brought us LLMs often insist that if they're not engaging in actual thought now equal to or greater than humans, it's only a matter of time and technological development. But it might just be that robots are one thing and people are another.

As for students and learning, schools have been engaged in a large-scale industrial production of young minds for long enough for Charles Dickens to have noticed. In some ways that seems to have intensified. The mass of students are trained to complete set tasks at best. And doing more than that is hard, no question. No education system is perfect, and arguments about ours will no doubt continue. But at this historical juncture it's crucial to at least preserve individual thought as an ideal.

Got the time

From Clocks, a brief and picture-heavy book by Simon Fleet:

Small water-clocks were used in the Athenian Courts to limit the time a lawyer was allowed to speak. This led to those who filled the water-clocks being bribed by lawyers to fill only partially the container when rivals were pleading, and so reduce their opponents' allotted time, and the same thing used to happen in Rome under Pompey. There is a story that a Roman prisoner's life was saved by a pebble falling into a water-clock, which made the water drip so slowly that it gave extra time for some delayed evidence to arrive, which acquitted him of murder.

As Fleet notes elsewhere in the book, the timing of things down to the minute wasn't considered a necessity until the rise of the railroads in the nineteenth century. Up until that point, clocks were mostly considered a luxury. But duration, at the very least, was important in some respects, as in the Greek and Roman court systems. Perhaps it's not too surprising that the clocks of the time were sometimes used and abused in corrupt ways. Of course if you were an innocent man on trial for your life, you wouldn't object to their being a bit fallible.

Norse intensity

I just watched The Night Visitor. It's a movie from 1971. Max von Sydow plays an erstwhile farmer whose sister and brother-in-law framed him for murder years earlier. Now he's locked away in an asylum but he figures out a way to get out and back in, and he's got no compunctions about killing people for real now. It's sort of a Vincent Price role, but more physical. If von Sydow did a fraction of his own stunts then wow. Trevor Howard is a police inspector looking into the new murders and the old one. The cast includes Swedish, Danish, and British actors, and there's no real attempt to hide that.

It's all filmed in Sweden, though. Sweden in what appears to be the depths of winter. At one point you can see a bevy of swans swimming off a snowy shore. Wintry Sweden is really quite picturesque. Although I don't think I'd recommend running around everywhere in your skivvies, as von Sydow's character does through most of the movie.

Dee plus

It's interesting to see in a couple of different sources the suggestion that William Shakespeare might have based Prospero on John Dee. Prospero is the protagonist of The Tempest, a powerful magician, and also an exile. That would sort of seem to fit. 

John Dee in life was an accomplished mathematician and scientist, who also had a serious interest in the occult. The same could be said of Isaac Newton. It was less of an anomaly in Elizabeth I's time than it is in ours, when scientists are expected to be materialists only. And it just so happens we remember Newton for one thing and Dee for another.

Of course it's just something to ponder. Even if the Bard were still alive I'm not sure he could or would elucidate things.

Cyberpunk all night and party every day

I just finished reading William Gibson's Neuromancer. Not the first Gibson I've read. I'd previously read The Difference Engine, which he wrote with Bruce Sterling and which formalized steampunk fiction. Also The Peripheral. But Neuromancer is the one that kicked things off from him.

It's definitely influential. The seedy Pacific Rim setting, for one thing. The girlfriend who has herself programmed with kickass martial arts moves. Something like The Matrix movies wouldn't be imaginable without this book. A lot of synth & samples musicians have paid tribute to Neuromancer as well. 

And Silicon Valley has done their best to make this world real. Well, the villains in the book live pretty high off the digital hog. No wonder someone wants to emulate them.

Here kitty

This is kind of a déjà vu. I was walking home from a grocery run and saw a cat nearby. To give you some context, I was walking up a street that's basically a bridge. The cat was just off and under, on a hill. I could tell it was a domestic cat from the collar. This is not a great place for a cat to be, because it's close to the highway. Nor could I get to the cat. The whole setup of the bridge discourages that, for obvious reasons. Plus, the cat was already retreating despite the separation between us, so it probably would have broken into an all out run otherwise. 

I did describe what I saw in an entry on the Providence subReddit. Someone who responded said they think they know where the cat lives. I'm hoping the owners or somebody can do something from the other side.

Words for snow

It's interesting to take a look at the Sámi people. For the most part, they live in Northern Scandinavia and Finland. Their language is Uralic rather than Indo-European. Uralic languages also abound in Siberia and a few other spots in Asia. Finnish, Hungarian, and Estonian are all Uralic languages as well, and of course they're in Europe. But Sámi are different because many of them have maintained a nomadic lifestyle. In that way they have something in common with the Eurasian populations of thousands of years ago.

“Learning to read snow is crucial to proper reindeer migration,” says Frandy. Being able to identify and name skarta, for example, which means fallen rain has formed a hard layer of crust atop the snow, making wildlife grazing difficult, is an essential tool for herders. But reading snow can also tell you a bigger story about the season in general. “The way that snow packs, in particular, tells you a larger story about winter,” he says. "As the layers accumulate, it becomes a record of the season so far and you develop a relationship to it.”

That's led them to have a knowledge of and relationship to the natural environment, one which blows away those of us who live in more settled areas.