🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Sep15.164552.12331@galois.mit.edu> tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow) writes:
>Superintelligent aliens land on earth and, suppressing snickers,

Now how can they be considered superintelligent if they suppress snickers?
Don't they believe in freedom of candy bar choice :-) ?

>                                                                 present
>mankind with a black box that takes typewritten input and outputs
>typewritten messages.  The aliens ask us to try to figure out whether or
>not the black box is conscious.  So the world's cleverest people come and
>try asking the box different questions and offering various typewritten
>messages to feed it.

The black box is marked TOP SECRET, and only military types ever see it.
Nobody intelligent enough to do adequate testing is even allowed close
to the thing.

>Humans: Well, if it wasn't just a black box, we'd swear there was a human
>...
>                     It certainly passes the Turing test.  We're inclined
>        to say that it's conscious.
>Aliens (guffawing): Oh, really?  Well, as a matter of fact, the black box is
>        just a lookup table!  What do you think of THAT?

See what I mean about the military approach.  Apparently these guys
didn't even test for secret information channels into the box, such as
would be needed to constantly update the tables.  Either that, or their
questioning was so inept as to not discover the inability of the device
to keep tolerably abreast of current affairs.

>How might we respond?
>
>1. Well, who cares if it's a lookup table?  It passes the Turing test, so
>   for all intents and purposes it's conscious.

Anybody jumping so quickly to this conclusion could probably be fooled
today by a stage magician equipped with suitable radio transceivers to
install in the black box and a cadre of remote assistants to actually
participate in the TT dialogue.

Any decent scientist would want to know much more about what was really
happening inside the box before rushing to judgment.