http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/33233.wss
Recently my dad told me about this IBM computer that’s supposed to compete on Jeopardy next week against the two biggest winners of Jeopardy. The computer has been programmed to be able to answer Trebeck’s questions in the form of a question, true to Jeopardy tradition, however it can take several hours (even days) to answer a question on occasion. I’m interested to see who is going to win, but I don’t know if I’m really on board with saying that a computer is “smarter” than a Jeopardy genius no matter the outcome. I don’t know that I would even call the programmers “smarter,” at least not on the same level. I feel like the game completely changes when it’s humans vs. programs. I just wanted to post this and get some other people’s thoughts on it.
This comes back to the idea that "if X machine seems like it's doing Y human activity, then..." And that's exactly it, those three dots that I can't quite make out.
ReplyDeleteTo US, the computer seems like it's acting humanly, but inside it's just responding to what it's been programmed to do. It's a working algorithm.
If I am to respect the position that human beings are "programs," then I would say that we are very troublesome and complex programs at that. Because as complex as the IBM computer is, it's not, I think, as complex as even the simplest instance of human--a newborn babe, for example.
I could go on, but I'll stop here.
You just put into words a lot of things that I was thinking that I didn't really know how to say. I guess that's my problem with comparing computers to humans/comparing computer "intelligence" to human "intelligence". I guess for me, a lot of the excitement about what machines can/can't do gets overshadowed by my excitement that humans are capable of creating these machines and for some reason have this (possibly perverse) desire to create something that out-humans the human.
ReplyDeleteA perverse desire to out-human human, and a chance to play the ultimate form of the God game.
ReplyDelete