9. Artifical intelligence

Philosophy of Language

9. Artificial intelligence

Alan Turing (1912-1954)

• a British mathematician, logician, computer scientist and cryptanalyst

• during the World War II worked for the army in Bletchley Park, codebreaking Enigma machine

• after the war co-created one the earliest stored programme computers, Manchester Mark 1

• in 1952 investigated for homosexuality, had to choose between imprisonment and probation (chose probation)

• probation was based on hormonal treatment designed to reduce libido, based on injections of estrogen – his hair has fallen off, his breast grew, very depressed

• died of poisoning by cyanide in an apple (suicide), his mother thought it was accident

Works

• his life inspired many films

• Turing machine: “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” digital computer = Turing’s machine are synonyms

• Turing test: “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, Mind, 1950 – about whether machines can think

• “Can there be digital computers that could do well in the imitation game (= to think)?”

Thinking machines

“I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, ‘Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” (Turing 1950, p. 442)

Chatbots

• Simple programs based on “pattern matching”:

• Joseph Weizenbaum, ELIZA, 1964-1966 – tried to imitate the behaviour of therapist (Very simple and vague)

• Terry Winograd, SHRDLU, 1968-1970

• Roger C. Schank & Robert P. Abelson, SAM, 1975

• Loebner prize (organised University of Surrey, since 1993): restricted test – five minutes, selected topics, no “tricky questions”, the language of a twelve-year old

• Barnum effect (University of Reading, 2014): = people find something in anything, when you give them some vague input, they’ll actually believe it (astrology + cart learning works thanks to this effect)

• Vladimir Veselov, EUGENE GOOSTMAN, 2001-2014 – imitates the behaviour of non-native speaker

• Kenneth Mark Colby, PARRY, 1971-1972 – imitates paranoid person, answer for everything is “why do you want to know? What do you want to do with me?”

• Joseph Weizenbaum, CATATONIC, 1974 – don’t answer at all (even doesn’t need computer for it)

John R. Searle (*1932)

• an American philosopher of language and mind, co-author of speech acts theory

• studied under supervision of John L. Austin at Oxford University, teaches at the University of California, Berkeley

• in the 1980s he created an argument against “strong” artificial intelligence “Minds, Brains, and Programs”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1980