viewtopic.php?f=14&t=28258
BiV's thread reminded me of a paper I thought worth sharing. It’s not that it’s thought provoking and I’m sure there’s a lot of folks here who can appreciate the twists it takes, but I think what strikes me about this paper is its compassionate treatment of Turing and how his landmark paper, “Computing machinery and intelligence” may actually contain encrypted meaning that reflects on the tribulations in Alan Turing’s life. Below are a few excerpts from that paper by Cowen and Dawson entitled, “What does the Turing test really mean? And how many human beings (including Turing) could pass?”.
https://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoic ... gfinal.pdf
Turing’s paper is rich and multi-faceted and we are not seeking to overturn all of the extant interpretations. We do wish to suggest that a potent and indeed subversive perspective in the paper has been underemphasized. Some of the message of Turing’s paper is encouraging us to take a broader perspective on intelligence and some of his points are ethical in nature. …
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Our interpretation fits the broad outlines of Turing’s life. Turing was gay and he was persecuted for this difference in a manner which led to his eventual suicide. In mainstream British society of that time, he proved unable to consistently “pass” for straight. Interestingly, the second paragraph of his paper starts with the question of whether a male or female can pass for a member of the other gender in a typed conversation. …
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It also has been speculated that Turing was autistic or Asperger’s, which suggests his mind was of a very different nature, compared to most of the people he knew. Turing probably was not aware of these neurodevelopmental concepts as such (they had not yet entered standard English-language discourse), but surely he knew, growing up, that he was in some ways very different from others. In public school he was judged to be “ludicrously behind” with “the worst” writing ever encountered, and he was singled out as “bound to be a problem for any school or community.” … Turing himself could not pass a test of imitation, namely that of imitating the people he met in mainstream British society, and for most of his life he was acutely aware that he was failing imitation tests in a variety of ways. …
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Turing never uses the phrase “Turing test” in his paper, but instead refers to the “imitation game.” …
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In other words, he closes with a call for pragmatism, a recognition and mobilization of many different forms of intelligence, and again he is warning us that imitation isn’t everything. Equating indistinguishable with intelligence may be a serious error. We read Turing as offering an implicit ethical admonition. Turing himself could not “pass” as “normal” in the world of his time and he wasn’t so concerned that machines couldn’t “pass” either. Intelligence will continue to pop up in surprising and indeed hard to recognize forms. …
The authors were understandably proud of their work. You can read from their blogs below:
Cowen: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalr ... -mean.html
Dawson: http://autismcrisis.blogspot.com/2009/0 ... essay.html