![]() Thanks to progress in microelectronics design as well as management of energy and the electromagnetic spectrum, a microchip that costs less than a dollar can now link an array of sensors to a low-power wireless communications network. Meanwhile, as you might have heard, network connectivity has exploded. A few decades ago the gyroscopes and accelerometers that are now in every smartphone were bulky and expensive, limited to applications such as spacecraft and missile guidance. Sensors have become abundant because they have, for the most part, followed Moore's law: they just keep getting smaller, cheaper and more powerful. If you work in a modern office building or live in a newly renovated house, you are constantly in the presence of sensors that measure motion, temperature and humidity. GPS sensors and gyroscopes in your smartphone. There are cameras and microphones in your computer. To put the competitors into a “telepathy-proof room” would satisfy all requirements.Here's a fun experiment: Try counting the electronic sensors surrounding you right now. The situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was listening with his ear to the wall. If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up. On the other hand, he might be able to guess right without any questioning, by clairvoyance. Perhaps this psychokinesis might cause the machine to guess right more often than would be expected on a probability calculation, so that the interrogator might still be unable to make the right identification. But then the random number generator will be subject to the psychokinetic powers of the interrogator. Then it will be natural to use this to decide what answer to give. Suppose the digital computer contains a random number generator. The machine can only guess at random, and perhaps gets 104 right, so the interrogator makes the right identification.” There is an interesting possibility which opens here. The interrogator can ask such questions as ‘What suit does the card in my right hand belong to?’ The man by telepathyor clairvoyance gives the right answer 130 times out of 400 cards. This is rather cold comfort, and one fears that thinking is just the kind of phenomenon where ESP may be especially relevant.Ī more specific argument based on ESP might run as follows: “Let us play the imitation game, using as witnesses a man who is good as a telepathic receiver, and a digital computer. One can say in reply that many scientific theories seem to remain workable in practice, in spite of clashing with ESP that in fact one can get along very nicely if one forgets about it. This argument is to my mind quite a strong one. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. ![]() These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. ![]() I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extrasensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz., telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis. The Argument from Extrasensory Perception Well, at least this counterclaim doesn’t seem to hold anymore □ How could a thinking machine ever account for extrasensory perception such as “telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis” for which “the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming”?Īs Turing was one of the greatest scientific and mathematical thinkers of the twentieth century, this tells me that as recently as 1949 when the article was written, extrasensory perception was seen as a scientifically proven phenomenon. One of them however, and actually the one that Turing seems to find the strongest one, struck me as quite odd. Many of these are still today hot debates in AI discussions. In part 6 of the article, Turing explores several contrary views to the notion that machines can think. ![]() This is the article where the Imitation Game – later known as the Turing Test – is put forward.Īlthough I was familiar with most of Turing’s arguments there, reading it was nevertheless truly inspiring (more on that in a moment). ![]() Having been interested in Artificial Intelligence for a long time, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I hadn’t read Alan Turing’s famous article: “ Computing Machinery and Intelligence” until today. ![]()
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