The AI quote (from an article in Forbes by Rob Toews) that I’m commenting on today is from one of the world’s great heroes:
“It is customary to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine. I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set.”
It is almost inconceivable how important Alan Turing’s life is to everyone’s lives today. It would have been enough for him to have been a great mathematician, who contributed the theory of Universal Computation, in essence, the proof that all computers have equal capabilities, paving the way for all manner of computational machines to be applied to all manner of technical challenges. It would have been enough for him to have built one of the first working electronic computers. It would have been enough that he had ideas about AI techniques that were so far ahead of their time (including ideas about evolutionary computation and artificial neural networks). It would have been enough “The Turing Test,” discussed in a previous comment, has become an essential part of the zeitgeist.
But above all of this, Turing played a vital part in saving the world from Nazism. While one can argue that his contribution to breaking the Enigma code is sometimes overstated, neglecting not only the many other smart people who worked tirelessly at Bletchley Park but ignoring field soldiers and members of the underground resistance who were sacrificed to obtain intel and even Enigma machines to make his efforts possible. But one cannot argue that the breaking of Enigma, an accomplishment in which Turing was vital, brought an early end to WWII, saving countless lives, and smothering the Nazi threat, nearly to death.
What a hero. But I write this comment to caution against lauding heroes to the point of treating all their words as some sort of Gospel.
Turing was a mathematician. There is no evidence to say he had any deep understanding of human psychology or even the biological details of the human brain. To the contrary, he was a highly spectrum-ish individual who had an extremely difficult time understanding other people and communicating with them in a socially competent manner.
So when we read his quote that no “peculiarly human characteristic” is likely to exceed the capacities of computers, we really should take that with a grain of salt.
Turing was a great man, whose legend is made all the greater by the way society persecuted him to death for nothing more than his homosexuality after he had saved the entire free world. But that doesn’t mean everything he said about thinking and humanity has any more validity than anyone else. Statements like the one quoted here aren’t science, they are just casual opinion, from someone who has no more merit in that opinion than anyone else.