Tag: Turing Test

"Transcendence": 2-minute mini-feature

The director, writer, producer and stars of "Transcendence" talk here about the movie and the ideas behind it.  They all seem to think that uploading a human mind into a supercomputer is a serious possibility.  Paul Bettany reports neuroscientists at CalTech telling him that it may be only 30 years away. Of course this may just be movie hype.

Europe hits the gas pedal on driverless cars

There is no longer any doubt that driverless cars are coming.  Google recently announced that its test cars have completed half a million miles, with a flawless safety record. It hopes the technology will be available to the public in 2017.  Elon Musk, of PayPal and Space X fame, hopes that his electric car company Tesla Motors will have autonomous cars ready a year earlier. Outside the USA, governments and manufacturers don't want to be left behind.  Nissan has carried out the first public road test of an autonomous vehicle on a Japanese highway, and now European governments are getting...

Hollywood passes the Turing Test

When will a computer pass the Turing Test?  December 18th.  Well, according to Hollywood, anyway.  That's when "Her", a film by Spike Jonze, opens in the US.  Critics who saw it at the New York Film Festival in October liked it enough to give it a 100% fresh rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review site, and Scarlett Johansson is being talked about as a serious Oscar contender even though she never actually appears in the film. The plot involves a sensitive man played by Joaquin Phoenix who is upset by the failure of a long-term relationship.  He falls in love with...

Automation or liberation?

People get worried about automation.  Every time Google's driverless cars hit the headlines, journalists fret that the people who drive lorries, taxis, buses and so on - will soon be out of a job.  It's probably not true.  Trains have drivers even though they can't be steered.  Planes have pilots even though much of the flying process is automated.  Lorries, taxis and buses are likely to have humans in charge of them for many years to come, even if only to sort out the problem when they break down, or when passengers or cargo create an unexpected situation.  With any...

Google’s quantum computer

This is a post-script to my recent post on Eric Schmidt saying that the Turing Test would be passed within five years.  An interview with a pioneer in quantum computing suggests that Google just might be hoping to build a human-level AI in that sort of time frame. Google has recently bought a quantum computer from D-Wave, and during a long but fascinating webcast interview on Singularity 1 on 1, Geordie Rose, founder and Chief Technology Officer at D-Wave Computers, talked about how D-Wave is a key partner in Google's programme to develop machine intelligence.  Rose did not commit to any timelines, but when...

The Turing Test to be passed within five years – Eric Schmidt

“Many people in AI believe that we’re close to [a computer passing the Turing Test] within the next five years.”  So said Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman, speaking at The Aspen Institute last month. The Turing Test, of course, was proposed in 1950 by brilliant computer pioneer Alan Turing as a way to decide whether a machine could be said to think. The Turing Test has many critics, but it seems to me that if a computer convinces a panel of humans that it has human-level consciousness and intelligence then we will have to accept that it is correct.  After all, that is...