The Real Risks of Artificial Intelligence, By David Lorge Parnas
Communications of the ACM, October 2017, Vol. 60 No. 10, Pages 27-31 DOI:10.1145/3132724
▻https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2017/10/221330-the-real-risks-of-artificial-intelligence/fulltext
What Alan Turing Really Said
Alan Turing is sometimes called the “Father of AI” because of a 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."1 It is frequently claimed that, in that paper, Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence.
Those who believe that Turing proposed a test for machine intelligence should read that paper. Turing understood that science requires agreement on how to measure the properties being discussed. Turing rejected “Can machines think?” as an unscientific question because there was no measurement-based definition of “think.” That question is not one that a scientist should try to answer.
Turing wrote: "If the meaning of the words ’machine’ and ’think’ are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, “Can machines think?” is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words."
Turing’s proposed replacement question was defined by an experiment. He described a game (the imitation game) in which a human and a machine would answer questions and observers would attempt to use those answers to identify the machine. If questioners could not reliably identify the machine, that machine passed the test.
Turing never represented his replacement question as equivalent to “Can machines think?” He wrote, “The original question, ’Can machines think?’ I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.” A meaningless question cannot be equivalent to a scientific one.
Most of Turing’s paper was not about either machine intelligence or thinking; it discussed how to test whether or not a machine had some well-specified property. He also speculated about when we might have a machine that would pass his test and demolished many arguments that might be used to assert that no machine could ever pass his test. He did not try to design a machine that would pass his test; there is no indication that he thought that would be useful.
"Artificial Intelligence" in German
When AI was young, a German psychology researcher visited pioneer AI researchers Seymour Papert and Marvin Minsky (both now deceased) at MIT. He asked how to say “artificial intelligence” in German because he found the literal translation (Künstliche Intelligenzk) meaningless.
Neither researcher spoke German. However, they invited him to an AI conference, predicting that he would know the answer after hearing the talks. Afterward, he announced that the translation was “natürliche Dummheit” (natural stupidity) because AI researchers violated basic rules of psychology research. He said that psychology researchers do not generally ask subjects how they solve a problem because the answers might not be accurate; if they do ask, they do not trust the answers. In contrast, AI researchers were asking chess players how they decide on their next move and then writing programs based on the player’s answers.