Episode 91: Three Simple Tests That Reveal A.I. Consciousness
Harrison Ford adminsters the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner
One question has plagued both scientists and science fiction authors for centuries: Will humanity ever build artificial beings who are conscious the same way we are? Spoiler alert: No. But we may one day work alongside sentient robots. In this episode, we talk about the tests people have devised to see if a computer is self-aware, some of which are totally bonkers. We'll also talk to Chen Qiufan, co-author of the brand new book A.I. 2041.
Notes, Citations, & etc.!
A.I. 2041 by Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan
Alan Turing was one of the first researchers to talk about the idea of thinking machines
In 1950, Turing wrote a seminal paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” which began with the question “Can machines think?”
These days, Turing's test for machine consciousness is called the Turing Test
The GPT-3 algorithm writes text based on predicting what words will come after each other in a sentence
Janelle Shane plays with it a lot on her AI Weirdness blog, including sample pickup lines generated by a variant of GPT-3 called DaVinci:
The best-known fictional test for artificial consciousness is the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner
A San Francisco newspaper once gave the Voight-Kampff test to all the candidates running for mayor (including Gavin Newsom!)
We know Skynet is conscious and self-aware because it starts killing people
Nick Bostrom is a philosopher who heads up the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University
Bostrom wrote a very influential book about AI called Superintelligence, which was hailed by Bill Gates and Elon Musk
A.I. researchers like Timnit Gebru and Joy Buolamwini have demonstrated that machine learning algorithms exhibit racial and gender bias.
MIT's Technology Review did a really great podcast about how A.I.s are being used in job interviews, and why this is a problem.
Scientist Geoffrey Jefferson gave a famous speech in 1941 called “Mind of Mechanical Man.”
The Matrix films show computers controlling us
In Janelle Monáe's "Dirty Computer," "cleaners" use the "nevermind" to erase a woman's memories of failing to conform to gender and racial stereotypes.