Marvin Minsky on AI: The Turing Test is a Joke!

[Music] g-girl so I'm here with a person who does need no introduction in the community of artificial intelligence for the simple reason that many people have called McKim the father of artificial intelligence and I am incredibly happy and very excited to welcome dr. Marvin Minsky on singularity one on one it's honor oh thank you hello so dr. Minsky I my goal here is to ask you hopefully some questions that you haven't been asked too often before so let me see if I will be successful in this attempt of mine or not by starting in this way can you perhaps share with us the personal story of how you got interested in artificial intelligence and why well when I was a young student I found a book called my mathematical biophysics in Widener Library and this was a wonderful book of essays by a scientist named Nicholas Reshevsky and it was a collection of little mathematical theories about various aspects of biology and each of these essays took some biological phenomenon like cell division or metabolism or function of some particular kind of cells like connections between neurons and so forth and made a miniature mathematical theory of some aspect of of that biological phenomenon and each chapter took some completely different a biological subject and made some assumptions about what was going on replaced each assumption by a mathematical equation or postulate and then solved that set of equations and predicted some particular effect or phenomenon so each chapter was a beautiful little self-contained way of understanding some phenomenon and as a child I had been interested in mathematics and science and many things like that but I have never seen them all put together in such clear and unambiguous ways now each of these theories is presumably correct in some aspects and completely wrong in others because it's an oversimplification but I thought it was beautifully done and some of the chapters were by other people than rejewski and by a wonderful set of accidents I met virtually all the people who had contributed to that collection of studies in the next few years this was just shortly after World War two I went to to college in 1946 which was just after the I spent a year in the in the Navy in 1945 but the war ended then and that ended with me being admitted to Harvard and meeting all the wonderful people who had been displaced from Europe during World War two so there were great many great scientists and in that area and over the next few years I met many of these great people I had lunch with Einstein and girdle and Robert Oppenheimer and many people who figured in the second half of the 20th century science that must have been absolutely amazing experience to get to meet Einstein and Jodl and Oppenheimer and all those people yes and it seemed like an everyday event for someone living at Harvard and MIT and Princeton and sort of if I'd spent many years shuttling between these institutions and talking to those people so how did you make the jump from a thematics and biology and interested in sort of how the brain works to your consequence interest in artificial intelligence or what came to be known nature as artificial intelligence oh it was the same thing all along because in this first book by Reshevsky there were many little theories particularly a little paper by McCulloch and Pitt's on how neurons could compute various things and how they might learn in one or two different ways and given that start it was easy to imagine other ways to - that things like neurons could learn I started to make my own theories of this and and I got interested in the question of how did neurons actually work and one problem was that there was no way in the late 1940s and early 1950s to observe these things very well and in the hope of seeing what's going on better I started to invent new kinds of microscopes and I spent a couple of years developing that sort of thing I invented the confocal microscope which was a instrument that had a higher resolving power than the machines available of those times and by the time I finished it I would got more interested in the theories of how the nervous system works and I made one set of pictures of a few neurons and never turned the machine on again even though I had spent a couple of years making it work so let me ask you this was your primary motivation to figure out the way to put all the different pieces together or was it something else it was at the beginning I thought as many people did that understanding how neurons work would be the first thing to do and then you would put those ideas together and figure out how larger and larger parts of the brain work until you ultimately someday in the distant future you'd understand the whole thing and then fairly suddenly it seemed to me that many people had tried that and that the current theories in the 1950s where if anything worse than the ones in the 1860s and seventies and I ran across the writings of several theorists William James had theories the early Freud had had a interesting theory of houndour neurons learned which didn't actually ever get published till 1950 because nobody in the I think he wrote the project for a scientific psychology in 1895 around then and he couldn't get anyone to publish it and it was finally published in 1950 and it was full of interesting ideas about how neurons might learn and let me ask you this perhaps you can tell us I mean I was very impressed and very struck by you know the accomplishment of your students and all the obvious impact that you have had of their life people did the two people present on our conference here ice does 2013 Raymond Kurzweil and Steve Mann but I want to ask you from your own point of view what's the thing that you're most proud of as your accomplishment that you hold dearest well maybe the I wrote a review of theories called steps toward artificial intelligence around 1970 and that sort of chart it's several possible lines of research which pretty much predicted what what several communities of researchers would do in the next 20 years those predictions started to fall apart around so that paper was 1970 roughly and by the late 1980s the world had changed and it was interesting because when I started research in that that general area almost all of my students soon became professors maybe 70 or 80 percent of them came graduate students wrote theses these became pretty influential and they got appointments in the universities and started their own research groups so up to the 1970s and 80s this was a this field called artificial intelligence kept developing somehow by 1980 though the opportunities for starting new research groups in that area declined and one reason is that at least in the United States there's no age limit on professors and but more serious was that most of this research had been financed by imaginative leaders in the defense department particularly in the Office of Naval Research which had an almost continuous inheritance of scientifically oriented commanders of various sorts you could go all the way back to to Hermann vile who was a great mathematical physicist who taught in Stein the theory of tensors which enabled Einstein to make his theories of relativity and gravitation and Hermann Vile's son Joe Joachim vile was in the Office of Naval Research in the 1940s and was partly responsible for helping scientists escape from Hitler if there's Empire in Europe in the late stages of World War two and exporting them to Harvard and Princeton and places MIT in places like that where I met most of them as a young student so it's sort of interesting phase of history where these great refugees accumulated and partly because of this accidental connection with military unfortunately in the later 1970s and 80s some liberal politicians in the United States decided that it was kind of immoral for the military to be doing basic research when they should be paying more attention to killing people which was their official job and this wonderful system of supporting basic science and research literally fell apart in the United States so that by 1980 as I was saying in the 1960s all of my students virtually became professors and did basic research by the 1980s virtually none of them because the American universities had stopped expanding because there was very little basic research money which had been coming from the military and civilian money was never very good at basic research well that's not really true the great monopolies like IBM and Bell Labs particularly had been able to do basic research because they had very little competition but as the anti monopoly laws became stronger and the Liberals got more power than the capitalists the quality of basic science declined so the paradox that very few people understood while it was happening that's a very interesting story about how funding for artificial intelligence caught stares but let me ask you do you have personally any mistakes that you regret doing in any of your long and profound career that you think that if you were doing today you would have done differently I can't think of any offhand but there must be quite a few but hmm for example anyway with the theory of mind or artificial intelligence and the potential routes toward to accomplishing that no I think I made some strategic mistakes my first book about artificial intelligence was a book called the society of mind and it had one page chapters and this book was very influential because it had the feature that if you didn't understand one of these chapters you could just skim it and it wouldn't matter very much and the result was that great numbers of high-school students understood most of the theories and knew more than their professors did when they got to college and then I wrote a second book called the emotion machine which had longer more conventional chapters and it has slightly better theories but they're much harder to understand because I didn't break them into tiny portions so that was I think a mistake and I hope to write a third book which simplifies the later theories so that more younger people can understand them let me ask you this once you said that science fiction writers are the unacknowledged engineers of our world would you mind elaborating a little bit on that on the importance of science fiction in general perhaps on your worldview or pursuit of artificial intelligence in particular well when I was a child I ran across various books and one of the most influential was book of short stories by HG Wells which may be 20 different stories in which he makes some hypothesis like somebody inventing anti-gravity and as soon as you invent anti-gravity you can make a inexpensive spaceship and go to the moon and find out what's there stuff like that and each of these HD well stories has some good idea which won't work but opens up some possibilities and there's Jules Verne in 1900 and what do you think of a stories like Frankenstein which are often given as an example of the fact that we should be meddling with certain things because we are going to be playing God or we're going to just Frankenstein was exactly the opposite here that this intelligent creature was created and well motivated and prejudiced people destroyed it so it was a morality tale which usually misinterpreted but anyway then there was a little vacuum but between HG Wells and those people in Aldous Huxley so forth in the early 20th century but they just as I was running out of them then then a new generation appeared with Isaac Asimov John Campbell the editor of astounding science fiction started to write in the 1940s 30s and 40s and by accident I happen to be in just the right place hi guys my lived nearby and when I started to that group to make robots and things like that Isaac was around to discuss it he refused to come to the lab to see them and I wondered why and he said well I I'm writing about really intelligent robots of the future I'm sure that if I came and saw the clumsy ones that you guys are making it would spoil my imagination right and I reluctantly agreed that he was right that reminds me to my interview with Daniel Wilson who wrote a book how to defeat a terminator kind of robot uprising so for example how do you escape from a robot you just walk away very slowly anyway what's your take on the technological singularity well there's progress and I've been watching it slowed down for the last eight or ten years so I'm a little bit less optimistic about when it will happen very interesting so you think it's decelerating rather than accelerating well then artificial intelligence it's certainly well because of this phenomenon that very few young people who are the show promise have been able to get jobs so I'm not I haven't seen very much progress in the last 10 or 15 years what about the examples such as Watson such as theory on our phones or Google Translator and many others such quote artificial intelligence system well Siri is pretty good but it's quite old but isn't it improving constantly I don't think it knows that you can pull things with a string but you can't push them it's in there improving a bit but not in the way that they were in the 60s and 70s 70s and early 80s so let's say on the one hand you have people like Ray Kurzweil who very bravely have published a timeline of the way he perceived in the future would unfold with respect to that and on the other hand you have skeptics who say that artificial intelligence is kind of like fusion we're always thirty years away from it but it we're never any closer whereabouts do you stand on that oh depends I think it depends on how many smart people get to work on it and sorry to predict because I would never have predicted that there would be fewer people working on AI now than 10 years ago but there are no jobs there might be 20 people working on Watson but 20 years ago there were a hundred people working or maybe 200 working on artificial intelligence and now I think there's half as many you mentioned the portion the poor with a string as one of the indicators of how smart an artificial intelligence system is let me ask you about the Turing test do you think that that's a good test or is it too human specific to be any good or bad about evaluating the intelligence of an artificial intelligence the Turing test is a joke sort of about saying a machine would be intelligent if it does things that an observer would say must be being done by a human so it it was suggested by Alan Turing as as one way to evaluated machine but he had never intended it as being the way to decide whether a machine was it was it was really intelligent so it's not a serious serious question I see so dr. Minsky what would you say to any young person who today is interested in doing research in artificial intelligence what's the best advice you can give them well they're certainly still are plenty of opportunities to to stay in the academic world and teach computer science there are lots of jobs in industry to develop applications of artificial intelligence but it's hard to find opportunities to do basic research so I'm not sure what kind of advice to give don't give up is the main main piece of advice don't give up I like that and what do you say to people who like professor Gary Marcus for example are suggesting that the path towards artificial intelligence will be had not a result of neuroscience but at the crossroads between psychology and neuroscience by bridging the two sciences he claims is the best approach through artificial intelligence I'm neutral about that I haven't seen much there was a lot of progress in a subject called cognitive psychology in the 1960s and 70s but I haven't seen it developing very well in the 80s and 90s so it seems to have cooled cooled down well his think was that much of the investment was taken by neuroscience and there were therefore in his point of view just like you said there was research in artificial intelligence for him the money went into artificial intelligence in neuroscience and there was none left for psychology that was his argument when I interviewed him on the show what do you think about that well I think artificial intelligence has been the main progress in psychology I don't think psychology itself has progressed much but I might I could I could be wrong about that and there could be major theories that just haven't become popular but but I haven't seen them you keep telling us about the importance of theories why do you think that the theory having a theory is the crucial thing on the way to accomplishing that task well a good example is that there's now a interesting movement to spend a billion dollars making a map of the nervous system dr. Kennedy Markham's whatever it is there's several of them and I'd say there's a 98% chance that they will not map the right aspects of the nervous system that they'll need to understand how it works what they should do is spend their billion dollars on the House floor of the Drosophila and make sure they understand it thoroughly before wasting money on wrong theories of what to map in the human brain because they might they may cause a fifty-year waste of discouragement if that if that project doesn't produce much it would cause great delay oh yeah that reminds me to something that you said yesterday during the conference you said we had a lot of bad theories that became very popular in the seventies well not for the ages wrong recently recently okay the current ways of trying to represent the nervous system in terms of probabilities I don't think our are much of an advance over what we had fifty years ago perhaps you're referring to whole brain emulation no I'm referring to probabilistic models of of learning I think I see well dr. Minsky it's been a pleasure interviewing you let me ask you the very last question that I always ask of guests on my show and that is what is the final message that you want to send out to people who would watch this half-an-hour interview with you if they were to take one message from you today what would you like that to be well I'm not interested in everything and if I'm really interested in good researchers and helping them get on the right path and as far as what I've learned from my own careers find the person who who's thinking you admire most and go and meet that person and see if you can copy him [Music] g-girl [Music]

Channel: Singularity Weblog

Views: 81,824

Rating: 4.8655462 out of 5

Keywords: Marvin Minsky, Artificial Intelligence, AI, Turing Test

Id: 3PdxQbOvAlI

Length: 30min 35sec (1835 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/Cosmologicon]

I can't watch the video at the moment so this may be redundant, but the Wikipedia article has, IMHO, an excellent summary of what I suspect is his attitude about the Turing test:

Mainstream AI researchers argue that trying to pass the Turing Test is merely a distraction from more fruitful research. Indeed, the Turing test is not an active focus of much academic or commercial effort—as Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig write: "AI researchers have devoted little attention to passing the Turing test."

It includes this great quote:

Planes are tested by how well they fly, not by comparing them to birds. Aeronautical engineering texts do not define the goal of their field as "making machines that fly so exactly like pigeons that they can fool other pigeons."

[u/[deleted]]

While I agree that Turing Test is a Joke from AI point of view, it's very interesting joke.

It tells a lot about how humans relate to other humans. We treat other humans as Rorschach plots and project our own intelligence to them.

[u/ReinH]

It's not a joke. For a thought experiment from a time when computers and the term "artificial intelligence" hadn't even been invented, it's amazingly prescient.

[u/fuzzynyanko]

There's been times where I have dealt with a human that failed the test

[u/brickshot]

The crux of the Turing test is the assumption that intelligent entities can tell the difference between a non-intelligent and intelligent entity.

If that's true then another way to determine if a computer program is intelligent would be to see if it could accurately administer the Turing test. Has anyone tried this?

-edit- clarity

[u/nawitus]

Can someone provide a summry of his argument?

[u/EmperorOfCanada]

I've always thought that an intelligent computer would interact like an intelligent computer. Sort of like if you talked with an intelligent alien they wouldn't pass a Turing test for human either. They could be wicked smart but as soon as you asked them about something human they would stumble.

Now if the computer or alien was really really smart they might be able to fool you into thinking they were a human but that would be a different test and not one for intelligence itself.

On the other hand after millions of Turing tests you might be able to have used a genetic algorithm that would allow a simple lookup table of excellent responses that would pass a Turing test 80% of the time. But the computer would have the intelligence of any key value pair array.

[u/sutr90]

Isn't Minsky that one guy who, together with Papert, doomed Neural Network research for almost 20 years, until it has been proved they were wrong?

EDIT: I understand now, I was wrong. Thank you guys for enlightenment. Our professor taught us wrong, or I dind't fully grasped the concept of their work.

[u/fantasticjon]

an okay interview.

I sort of think he is wrong about the amount of basic research going on in AI. I suspect its true that there may not be that as research in AI in academia as there used to be, but I think there is a ton of AI research going on in the governments, militaries, and giant corporations of the the world.