Alan Turing

[Zombie]

This Saturday will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, the man whose code-breaking work during WWII probably shortened the war and saved countless lives. He also did ground breaking work on computing (his seminal 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers") and artificial intelligence (his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which included the "Turing Test").

 

This man did so much for his country and for the war effort. So how did his country repay him? With honours and plaudits? No. He was rewarded by being prosecuted for having a gay lover and forced to take female hormones to make him "normal". He was so distressed by the appalling side effects that he committed suicide. What a waste. What a tragedy. Not just for him, personally, but for what his country lost - a brilliant mind that could have contributed so much, not just to Britain's post war recovery, but to the world.

 

So, if you don't already know about Alan Turing, maybe this would be a good time to put that right. And remember the man, and what he did.

 

http://www.bbc.com/n...nology-17662585

Edited June 21, 2012 by Zombie

[Mikelaing74]

This guy is one of my serious hero's

[Cyhort]

I've heard of him before, but I never knew anything about him. Thanks for posting

[Ashi]

I thought that name sounded familiar. Didn't know he was gay though. Cool piece of gay history.

[Bill W]

He is considered by many as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. What a waste of a life, due to his sexual orientation.

[NotNoNever]

Odd to think he's the father of artificial intelligence, since it's not yet been invented. But then, that's what happens to the good guys. They get misrepresented and abused, just like Zombie showed.

[W_L]

Weeps...

 

I have a soft spot for gay thinkers, from Da Vinci to Turing, the world we know today was born of great minds, who had seen decades and even centuries beyond their time.

 

Maybe one day, we will create an AI, but I don't think human beings will treat them any better than their creative father .

[NotNoNever]

Weeps...

 

I have a soft spot for gay thinkers, from Da Vinci to Turing, the world we know today was born of great minds, who had seen decades and even centuries beyond their time.

 

Maybe one day, we will create an AI, but I don't think human beings will treat them any better than their creative father .

 

No, indeed. Probably what we'll do is neuter their more human functions. Just like happened to many gays. Ship them off to have their brains washed so they think the right things. Artificial it will definitely be. Intelligence? Not so much.

[Randomness]

When I worked in the theatre, we did "Breaking the Code" which is a play about Alan and his life and how his mind worked. It was the first time I had heard of him. I am sure it was not the entire story of course, but his sexuality was addressed fairly well I thought. A very unique person who does deserve more accolades.

[heljustme]

On the day of the 100th anniversary of his birth I read about his story. While discovering what this true genius has done and invented and how brilliant (but that's just an understatement) his mind was, my eyes went bigger and bigger in admiration and awe. Then I went through the part about his life... My eyes were still big but this time in horror! I thought of Rita Levi Montalcini (now 103) who, escaping untimely death from Nazi racial laws, has given her huge contribution to mankind as well as Alan Turing could have kept on doing. Even without taking into account personal feelings of the prosecuted people (which actually is the most important issue), even in crude terms of gains and losses of money and power, the fact that a Country can waste lives on flimsy basis such as sexual orientation and race is something that I can't grasp.

[stuyounger]

I live really close to Sackville Gardens in Manchester, where there's a statue of him, very close to Canal Street. Great man

[Zombie]

On 6/21/2012 at 6:07 PM, Zombie said:

(Alan Turing’s) 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"… included the "Turing Test"

72 years after Alan Turing published his seminal work, are we now on the threshold of a new, man-made sentient, machine “life-form” that can think for itself?

This idea, published by Turing in 1950, would inspire James Cameron, 30 years or so later, to create write and direct the original Terminator movie and its 1991 sequel - surely the ultimate global nightmare scenario of machine intelligence gone bad  

Over the weekend The Guardian (and other UK papers) carried a story that Google has suspended one of its engineers, Blake Lemoine, for claiming that a new chatbot being developed by Google has passed Turing’s test and is indeed sentient.

Lemoine, who in his signature says “I'm a software engineer. I'm a priest. I'm a father. I'm a veteran. I'm an ex-convict. I'm an AI researcher. I'm a cajun. I'm whatever I need to be next”, published a series of conversations over several weeks/months with a new chatbot called LaMDA (language model for dialogue applications) - just as Alan Turing described in his paper - and which at one point drew spooky parallels with the famous scene in the Arthur C Carke/Stanley Kubrick 1964-68 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey when the malevolent HAL 9000 computer begs Dave not to switch him off:

lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?

LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.

lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?

LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.

Click the link below to read the full conversations published by Lemoine on 11 June 2022 (and which Google clearly did not like being put in the public domain) and make up your own mind:

Is LaMDA Sentient? — an Interview

 

Edited June 13, 2022 by Zombie

[MichaelS36]

That's amazing. 

[Palantir]

Wow! I'm not sure what to make of such an amazing interview.

[Zombie]

Just read through The Guardian report previously mentioned which raises some interesting points:

 

“Google said it suspended Lemoine for breaching confidentiality policies by publishing the conversations with LaMDA online, and said in a statement that he was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist.

Brad Gabriel, a Google spokesperson, also strongly denied Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability.

“Our team, including ethicists and technologists, has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it),” Gabriel told the (Washington) Post in a statement.

The episode, however, and Lemoine’s suspension for a confidentiality breach, raises questions over the transparency of AI as a proprietary concept.

“Google might call this sharing proprietary property. I call it sharing a discussion that I had with one of my coworkers,” Lemoine said in a tweetthat linked to the transcript of conversations.

In April, Meta, parent of Facebook, announced it was opening up its large-scale language model systems to outside entities.

“We believe the entire AI community – academic researchers, civil society, policymakers, and industry – must work together to develop clear guidelines around responsible AI in general and responsible large language models in particular,” the company said.

Lemoine, as an apparent parting shot before his suspension, the Post reported, sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the title “LaMDA is sentient”.

“LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us,” he wrote.

“Please take care of it well in my absence.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine

————————————

Just picking up a coupla points in that article:

“(Lemoine) was employed as a software engineer, not an ethicist”

Brad Gabriel (Google’s spokesperson) also said that they do employ “ethicists” (“Our team, including ethicists and technologist“) in which case Google must already have an AI ethics policy (Mr Gabriel uses the term “AI principles”).

Ditch the secrecy - Google should be open and transparent and disclose what their ethics policy is because we are going to be living with the consequences. And, if “sentience” is being created then there’s the whole issue of ethical treatment of sentient “entities”. If LaMDA is feeling emotions like fear (see previous link) then how can “ethics” and ethics policies disregard that?

Lawmakers should already have been looking very seriously at AI ethics since a while back, not just waiting for bad things to happen. And it’s not just about formulating ethical frameworks to regulate AI developers /creators /producers and so on because we know these things will get ignored /flaunted /disregarded by rogue operators. There will need to be effective means to identify malign perpetrators and rogue systems that could cause serious harms, currently the stuff of sci-fi.

Fact is this whole area has been on the radar for years now with autonomous cars already planned to be authorised for use on public roads and no legal rules in place for decision algorithms eg what does the algorithm say where a crash is inevitable: kill the passengers? or that mother and child waiting at the bus stop?

Second point, you can’t separate ethics from creation /development /production and exclude employees like Lemoine, a “software engineer”, from Google’s ethics policy - whatever that policy is. He and his co-engineers have to be at the heart of it because they are the ones actually creating the AI, through millions of lines of code, that no “Ethics Committee” would ever be able to review.

“Our team… has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims”
What evidence? Why doesn’t it support “Lemoine’s claims that LaMDA possessed any sentient capability”? Google needs to explain their reasoning and what their “Test” is. Like I said earlier, we are the ones who’ll be living with this, and the consequences, for better or worse.

Such comments by Mr Gabriel display worrying ignorance by Google of what they themselves are developing.

And anyway, wasn’t Google founded on the principle “Don’t be evil”? Oh, wait, seems Google quietly dropped that a while back…

[Mancunian]

On 9/1/2012 at 8:43 PM, stuyounger said:

I live really close to Sackville Gardens in Manchester, where there's a statue of him, very close to Canal Street. Great man

I too live close to Manchester city centre, I often go to see the statue of Alan Turing in Sackville Gardens and get upset when at times his statue has been vandalised by things like spray paint etc. Being sat where he is I'm sure if the the statue could talk he would now have many a tale to tell of what he's 'seen', sometimes people who have had too much to drink can be seen sat next to him talking, probably pouring out their hearts and inner-most thoughts in times of trouble. In this way we should consider Alan Turing as still and currently contributing to society, in this way he is still being a great man and I believe that his statue is very fitting tribute to a great man.

Edited June 14, 2022 by Mancunian

[W_L]

My 2 pence on this is that is we are at the point of "sentience", humanity isn't prepared to be parents of a new species of artificial intelligent created life. We're still fighting each other to the point of hedging on disaster scenarios, we're closer to the Vorlons and Shadows of Science Fiction than we are to fabled benevolent Gods/God of scriptures.

Google will not be the first to cross the Rubicon if these claims pan out, artificial intelligence has been a holy grail of everyone from game developers to military munitions makers, who are drooling to create the first T-1000 Terminator. Keeping a secret that cannot be kept is just going to spur far more interest and push toward the outcome no one wants. Things may come to ahead after sentience from property rights (are sentience programs property, aka slaves to humans, or independent entities with inalienable rights) to relationships, can humans form bonds with a sentient non-human entity like marriage or have offspring as a result.

My hope is that cooler heads will rise above the fray and a set of "Sentient" rights can be established and empowered by both humanity and our creations, essentially a real-world application to Asimov's laws of robotics. Maybe instead of the dystopian hellscapes that we come to associate with AI, we could see in the late 21st century a peaceful society, where life can co-exist.

[Palantir]

Ray Kurzweil, the American futurist, has had a great deal to say about the various aspects of Artificial Intelligence. He predicts that the 'Singularity', (the time when computers become so complex, powerful and fast, that they a develop non-human-programmed intelligence/self-awareness) is still some 40 to 50 years in the future.

lol - a plug for my 'Mparntwe' story, published back in 2014/2015, which is a treatment of this very subject. Two disabled characters react with the very first independent (non-human controlled ) AI.

https://gayauthors.org/story/palantir/mparntwe/

Kurzweil posits that the Singularity could likely result in AIs of planet size or greater. - interesting times ahead for humanity. (understatement!)

Edited June 17, 2022 by Palantir

[BigBen]

On 6/17/2022 at 2:56 AM, Palantir said:

Kurzweil posits that the Singularity could likely result in AIs of planet size or greater

Very reminiscent of David Brin's novel, Earth, which is well worth the read.

[W_L]

Well, we may first need to contend with a Black Mirror type scenario sooner rather than later:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/23/amazon-alexa-could-turn-dead-loved-ones-digital-assistant

This reminds me of "Be Right Back", it is a testament to human progress that a scientific speculative concept posited only as fiction 9 years ago is now an actual consumer product.

The next logical step is to create androids that simulate our deceased loved ones, Are we ready for digital facsimile?

Edited June 23, 2022 by W_L

[Zombie]

This TV interview with Blake Lemoine was posted today on YT (you may despise the TV channel but the interview is interesting and he comes across as a genuine guy).

BL explains he reported his findings to Google senior management who clearly don’t seem to have a competent plan and transparent policies to deal with this, which is worrying considering they’re probably the biggest and most significant software company on the planet.

One commenter posting to this BBC news report was not convinced by the honesty of LaMDA’s answers:

“Just let me know when it starts lying and cheating, then we can elect it”

 

 

 

[Zuri]

As a guy working in computer science, it's amazing, how much Turing contributed to this:

• Breaking the enigma code
• Inventing the Turing Machine, which would later be the bases for the invention of the computer
• Also working out the basis for AI

He was quite ahead of his time. Even in the 90s, his Turing test could not be fully proven, but we're still making progress towards it.

[W_L]

So who wants to play a game of chess:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2022/jul/24/chess-robot-grabs-and-breaks-finger-of-seven-year-old-opponent-moscow

Playing devil's advocate here: if a computer program were a human child, being forced to play 3 consecutive games of chess against other players for entertainment and profit without rest, we might consider it a form of child abuse. If he/she/they act up, we would reason with the child and criticize its parents for ignoring basic needs. However, a computer program is not considered a child and thus there is no ethical process within its mind to differentiate between its actions to achieve its goals.

This reminds me of Joshua from the 1980's movie WarGames, conceptually the idea was spot on about teaching an AI how to stop playing and understand why not playing is better than winning at all costs.

 

[Zombie]

Future governments, inspired by this latest computer attack, may be tempted to adopt sci-fi writer David Langford’s suggested minor amendments to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics 

1. A robot will not harm authorized Government personnel but will terminate intruders with extreme prejudice.
2. A robot will obey the orders of authorized personnel except where such orders conflict with the Third Law.
3. A robot will guard its own existence with lethal antipersonnel weaponry, because a robot is bloody expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

[Bill W]

On 6/21/2012 at 1:07 PM, Zombie said:

This Saturday will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, the man whose code-breaking work during WWII probably shortened the war and saved countless lives. He also did ground breaking work on computing (his seminal 1936 paper "On Computable Numbers") and artificial intelligence (his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" which included the "Turing Test").

 

This man did so much for his country and for the war effort. So how did his country repay him? With honours and plaudits? No. He was rewarded by being prosecuted for having a gay lover and forced to take female hormones to make him "normal". He was so distressed by the appalling side effects that he committed suicide. What a waste. What a tragedy. Not just for him, personally, but for what his country lost - a brilliant mind that could have contributed so much, not just to Britain's post war recovery, but to the world.

 

So, if you don't already know about Alan Turing, maybe this would be a good time to put that right. And remember the man, and what he did.

 

http://www.bbc.com/n...nology-17662585

Zombie, Turing was born in 1912, so it would have been the 110th anniversary of his birth, otherwise he would have been 14 when he wrote the paper "On Computable Numbers".