🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <26534@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>In article <1992Oct2.225739.4915@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@opal.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
>>In article <26519@castle.ed.ac.uk> cam@castle.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) writes:
>>>Indeed, in expert systems, knowledge representation plus mechanical
>>>inferencing systems are not only capable of chains of deductive
>>>reasoning, and making hypotheses and testing them, but of explaining
>>>what they are doing and why they are doing it in a persuasively
>>>rational manner.
>
>>If they can do this, they are conscious.
>
>Many years ago to entertain some schoolkids I wrote a BASIC program
>based on ELIZA which was capable of having apparently sensible
>conversations with the user about how it worked. The point of the
>exercise was to present them with something that behaved as though it
>was intelligent and conscious, but which was capable of dispelling the
>illusion by explaining the simple trickery involved.
>
>I take it that you would have insisted that the program's dispelling
>of the illusion was the trickery, and that I had actually succeeded in
>writing a conscious computer program in 60Kbytes of BASIC?

One of the things that completely surprised me when I came to
the Edinburgh AI Dept was that some students would defend the
idea that ELIZA wasn't just a "trick", and that (so far as
I could tell) they really thought this was the case.  That is,
they weren't just defending it for the sake of argument.
What surprised me even more was that members of the faculty
were prepared to defend the same position.

I still don't know what to make of this.

-- jd