Abstract
Philosophical discussion of Alan Turing’s writings on intelligence has mostly revolved around a single point made in a paper published in the journal Mind in 1950. This is unfortunate, for Turing’s reflections on machine (artificial) intelligence, human intelligence, and the relation between them were more extensive and sophisticated. They are seen to be extremely well-considered and sound in retrospect. Recently, IBM developed a question-answering computer (Watson) that could compete against humans on the game show Jeopardy! There are hopes it can be adapted to other contexts besides that game show, in the role of a collaborator of, rather than a competitor to, humans. Another, different, research project—an artificial intelligence program put into operation in 2010—is the machine learning program NELL (Never Ending Language Learning), which continuously ‘learns’ by ‘reading’ massive amounts of material on millions of web pages. Both of these recent endeavors in artificial intelligence rely to some extent on the integration of human guidance and feedback at various points in the machine’s learning process. In this paper, I examine Turing’s remarks on the development of intelligence used in various kinds of search, in light of the experience gained to date on these projects.
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Notes
- 1.
Where I think Turing was indicating “human” or “humans” in using the term “man” or “men”, I may paraphrase or replace words within brackets accordingly.
- 2.
In supervised learning, all of the examples given the computer program during training are labeled; in semi-supervised learning, the computer program is provided with labels for only a subset of the examples it is given to deal with, and in unsupervised learning, none of the examples the computer program is to deal with is labeled.
- 3.
The dating of the work as composed in the summer of 1948 is per Jack B. Copeland, footnote 53 of Copeland (ed.). (2004), p. 409. Copeland notes errors by others in stating the date of this report. He notes that the phrase “Manchester machine (as actually working 8/7/48)” appears in both the finished NPL [National Physical Laboratory] report and in the draft typescript. Thus the draft report was completed sometime after July 8. The 1948 conference of the International Congress of Genetics was held July 7–14, 1948 (Bengtsson and Tunlid 2010, p. 709).
- 4.
Quoted in (Bengtsson and Tunlid 2010), p. 712.
- 5.
I think that Turing is very clear about the fact that he is drawing an analogy when he lays out the analogy between natural selection and the analogue he proposes be tried (in his later (1950) paper Computing machinery and intelligence). In the analogy in that paper, which he explicitly lays out there, he says that “the judgment of the experimenter” is analogous to Natural selection. In that analogy, “how well [the machine] learns” would be analogous to how well an animal form does in terms of survival.
- 6.
In Copeland (ed.) 2004, p. 409.
- 7.
Vygotsky”s Thought and Language was published in 1934, and he had traveled to London before that.
- 8.
- 9.
“NELL: The Computer that Learns”, downloaded 25 January 2014. http://www.cmu.edu Web.
- 10.
In (Mitchell et al. 2009).
- 11.
Checking NELL’s “Recently-Learned Facts” on January 26, 2014, I find that “h_ross perot is a politician who holds the office of president” is held with 99.2% confidence!
- 12.
Of the 4.53% of answers that were not Wikipedia titles, “some are multiple answer questions (e.g., “Indiana, Wisconsin, and Ohio” and “heat and electricity”), some are synthesized answers to puzzle questions (e.g. “TGIF Murray Abrahams” and “level devil”) and a small number are verb phrases (e.g., “get your dog to heel”) (Chu-Carroll 2012a; 4:2)
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Sterrett, S.G. (2017). Turing on the Integration of Human and Machine Intelligence. In: Floyd, J., Bokulich, A. (eds) Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 324. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53280-6_14
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