Bots Are Passing The Turing Test. Here's Why That's a Problem | Answers with Joe

last week a tragic school shooting in Florida claimed the lives of 17 people you probably heard about it and it's possible that the source of the information that you got was nothing but a line of code because within hours of the shooting hundreds of thousands of Twitter BOTS flooded social media with opinionated articles and hashtags like gun reform now and parkland shooting according to the New York Times an army of Twitter BOTS run by Russian counterintelligence agencies have been using wedge issues like this to create a divide amongst the American people on social media for years now how much that played into the results of the last election is still up for debate and by the way speaking as an American how dare Russia get involved in our elections I mean it's not like we would ever stick our nose and all right Twitter actually cracked down on these BOTS recently deleting thousands of accounts that fit the same kind of patterns that BOTS would show including certain grammatical usage use of hashtags automatically retweeting certain types of articles that kind of thing these BOTS literally just some lines of code have been able to heighten people's emotions change their attitudes even change their behavior by posing as real people with real concerns and opinions do these BOTS pass the Turing test Alan Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist possibly the first computer scientist at a time when computers didn't even exist yet he was the first to formalize the concept of algorithm and computation by creating the Turing machine which used a binary system that recorded information on strips of paper and it's considered to be the first general-purpose computer he was a genius by any standard and was famously hired by British intelligence during World War two to run the Hutt ate group which eventually deciphered the Nazi Enigma code the Enigma code is what allowed the Nazis to send messages to each other over radio without being deciphered and the nature of their work was highly secretive so it's hard to say for certain but many people say that this may have shortened the length of the European war by two years and maybe saved up to 14 million lives Turing is also a tragic figure because he was gay at a time when being gay was a crime that wasn't supposed to rhyme I'm still doing it he was prosecuted in 1952 for indecent acts and accepted chemical castration to avoid going to prison he died just two years later from an apparent suicide it's hard to quantify just how big of a loss this was to the world and what he could have done with more time but what he was able to contribute in his short 41 years on this earth was remarkable and drastically ahead of its time because not only was he creating computers at a time before they existed and laying down the concepts that make what you're doing right now possible he was also able to think even further ahead and imagine a time when computers could think or at least appear intelligent enough to pass off as humans and it was in this line of thought that he created the Turing test the idea behind the Turing test was to determine whether or not a computer could fool a person into thinking that the computer was an actual human being it was based off of a party game at the time called the imitation game where two people would go into separate rooms with typewriters and people would ask them questions through the door and they would answer on the typewriters pretending to be the other person and then the guest tried to figure out which what person was which Turing proposed replacing one of the people with an AI and conducting the same experiment to see if the AI could pass it so far as human it's a pretty simple idea but it has some issues by the way contrary to popular belief the purpose of the Turing test isn't to determine whether or not a computer is intelligent it's just meant to see if a computer could imitate human intelligence it wasn't really seeking to create a conscious machine he was a programmer and he wanted to see if it was possible to program a computer so well that people couldn't tell that it was a computer so although the term Turing test has been used often to talk about machine consciousness the fact is that kind of AI was probably even beyond his own imagination remember computers back then worked off of punch cards it does beg the question though how do you define intelligence we associate intelligence with human intelligence but the truth is humans often do not behave in intelligent ways any parent will tell you put two ten-year-old brothers in a room together for more than five minutes and you will see some very unintelligent behavior also when they're 15 and when they're 30 we are not intelligent logical creatures as much as we want to think we are we are emotional creatures and a vast amount of our behavior is not based on logic our intelligence of any kind on the other hand many other animals do display some kind of rudimentary intelligence like chimps learning basic math and gorillas learning sign language and crows doing all kinds of things crows are crazy smart the test is also very heavily effective other questioners selves their own biases their own intelligence their own perception levels and what comes off as human to one person may be completely inhuman to another person they're also a lot of variables in the test like should the guesser know that one of the participants is a computer should they not should the guesser know that they're in a test at all and this is led to several different types of tests and test methodologies a reverse Turing test puts the onus on the program to determine whether or not the person asking the questions is a machine or a person captures are a good example of this it's a program designed to figure out whether a person visiting a website is a person or not there's a subject matter expert version of the test where the person asks questions along a certain subject line and the Machine tries to pass itself off as an expert in that subject you can argue this as most functional version of the test because a computer that could pass itself off as an expert could actually be of some kind of use in a particular field of study there's the minimum intelligence signal test which only uses binary answers yes/no and true and false this takes away any anthropomorphism bias and focuses on the capacity for thought as opposed to language comprehension and there are different variations of all of these somewhere one of the participants doesn't know he's in a test somewhere the person asking the questions is actually a program etc so currently AI research focuses on things like object analysis facial recognition and logistics things like GPS and shipping and tracking that kind of stuff my research today is move far beyond the original idea of the Turing test in fact the Turing test now is considered really to be more of a thought experiment just a nice thing that has its place in the history of computer science iliza for example is one of many AI style chat BOTS that and the traditional sense can pass a Turing test but it's still not thinking for itself that's simply using a pre-programmed set of responses to seem human things took an interesting turn last October when Sophia from Hanson robotics was actually given citizenship by the country of Saudi Arabia David Hanson of Hanson robotics is a former Disney Imagineer and became kind of obsessed with getting over uncanny valley which is the psychological phenomenon of robots or animations getting more and more creepy as they get more and more human his AI in robotics research led to him creating Sophia who can carry on a conversation is even known to have a bit of a sense of humor she also has a very expressive face that even blinks like a normal person would it's hard to say exactly how real her capabilities are any videos that you find are from promotional events where things could very easily be scripted out and the whole citizenship thing from Saudi Arabia was also a bit of a publicity stunt as Saudi Arabia's trying to position itself as a tent capital of the world to prepare for a world post-oil but it does open up some interesting questions about robot citizenship like what kind of rights does she have can she boat if somebody drops her can she sue them these are actual questions we're gonna have to eventually figure out but the immediate issue is how this technology affects our sources of information technology for all of its upsides has always had a way of sort of muddying the truth first Photoshop made it so that you couldn't trust images that you see and now the technology is possible to change voices and videos to the point that there are these things online now called deep fakes which are porn videos featuring celebrities that are obviously not real but still pretty convincing of course a certain amount of common sense has to be applied here if you run across a video of Betty White and a lesbian threesome it's probably not real and now thanks to sophisticated bot programs even the people that you are talking to and communicating with online you can't be sure are actually real how big of a problem this is gonna be in the future is still hard to say but clearly we're gonna have to be even more savvy and skeptical about the things that we find online and that's just the world today it's a world that a hundred years ago maybe only one person could have imagined so you might say the world is finally caught up to ellen terry i want to thank you guys for watching and by the way if you didn't notice a new shirt this one celebrating the tesla roadster it's way to Mars with the falcon heavy pretty cool if you liked this and you want to take a look at this many of the other shirts we have available you can go to the store answer so joe calm slash shirts video is also supported by concur boy comm if you get canker sores on a regular basis there's something you can do about it this is a daily pill that helps them to go away and seventy percent of people you get a two-month risk-free trial if you go to concur boy comm and sign up today I also want to thank my patreon supporters for helping me keep on the lights around here I really do appreciate it there's some people that have just joined I want to call them out real quick not that many there's Jonathan Livni edom all Tommy Daum Bev and Chris Carruthers Rodrigo costo Ruth McKeon Ben Oleg house Oksana dolna Garrett Thompson and Soren Jack ow thank you guys so much for joining if you would like to join them get access to free perks and videos outtakes kind of thing you can go to patreon.com/scishow answers with Joe please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here I suggest you check out some of my other videos on similar topics and if you like those please subscribe cuz I comeback with videos like this every Monday alright that's it for now you guys go out have an eye-opening week and I will see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 600,282

Rating: 4.7630348 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, consciousness, machine consciousness, artificial intelligence, alan turing, enigma code, the turing test, Hut 8, Hanson Robotics, Sophia the robot, ELIZA chatbot, twitter bots, social media, online information

Id: XLG98G4JBc0

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 05 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/AptSeagull]

Dude, please stop

[u/wlorenz65]

I'll be impressed when it passes the Total Turing Test. Developing for the standard Turing Test only generates chatty chatbots.

[u/Don_Patrick]

The information in this video is accurate enough, except for bots passing the turing test, or even that the bots in question use any AI at all. None of those spambots respond to anyone, as one would in a turing test. They just post stuff that they're given to post.