turing's test vs the moral turing test by diane proudfoot
Philosophy & Technology, 2024
Given actual autonomous systems with capacities for harm and the public’s apparent willingness to... more Given actual autonomous systems with capacities for harm and the public’s apparent willingness to take moral advice from large language models (LLMs), Einar Duenger Bohn’s (2024) renewed discussion of the Moral Turing Test (MTT) is timely. Bohn’s aim is to defend an unequivocally behavioural test. In this paper, I argue against this direction. Interpreted as testing mere behaviour, the Turing test is a poor test of either intelligence or moral agency, and neither Bohn’s version of the test nor Allen, Varner and Zinser’s influential (2000) version avoids these problems. Also, the MTT’s advantages as advertised by Bohn do not hold up: it is an open empirical question whether embracing a merely behavioural MTT will significantly reduce the challenges in building a computer to pass the test. This issue aside, I argue that Turing’s actual test is superior to current AI benchmarks and to Bohn’s version of the test. A test of moral reasoning or agency in machines that is based on Turing’s actual test has advantages over current tests of moral reasoning in AI, including versions of the MTT. Such a test is an intriguing possibility still to be investigated.
MIT Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, 2024
International Journal of Social Robotics, 2014
Anthropomorphism is a phenomenon that describes the human tendency to see human-like shapes in th... more Anthropomorphism is a phenomenon that describes the human tendency to see human-like shapes in the environment. It has considerable consequences for people's choices and beliefs. With the increased presence of robots, it is important to investigate the optimal design for this technology. In this paper we discuss the potential benefits and challenges of building anthropomorphic robots, from both a philosophical perspective and from the viewpoint of empirical research in the fields of human-robot interaction and social psychology. We believe that this broad investigation of anthropomorphism will not only help us to understand the phenomenon better, but can also indicate solutions for facilitating the integration of human-like machines in the real world.
Philosophy, 1997
Cognitive science is held, not only by its practitioners, to offer something distinctively new in... more Cognitive science is held, not only by its practitioners, to offer something distinctively new in the philosophy of mind. This novelty is seen as the product of two factors. First, philosophy of mind takes itself to have well and truly jettisoned the ‘old paradigm’, the theory of the mind as embodied soul, easily and completely known through introspection but not amenable to scientific inquiry. This is replaced by the ‘new paradigm’, the theory of mind as neurally-instantiated computational mechanism, relatively opaque to introspection and the proper subject of detailed empirical investigation. Second, in the constitutive disciplines of cognitive science (cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science etc.) we have for the first time the theoretical, experimental and technological resources to begin this investigation. My concern here is to show that, despite its scientific and philosophical sophistication, the new (computational) paradigm is in certain striking ways very simi...
Science, 1999
The Age of Spiritual Machines When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Ray Kurzweil. Viking, New... more The Age of Spiritual Machines When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Ray Kurzweil. Viking, New York, 1999. 400 pp. $25.95. ISBN 0-670-88217-8. Kurzweil predicts that the next century will witness the fusion of humans and machines, but the reviewer finds such predictions for the future undercut by shortcomings in the book's account of the present and recent past.
Science, 1999
Ray Kurzweil (Letters, Science 's Compass, 16 July, p. [339][1]) responds to my review ( Scie... more Ray Kurzweil (Letters, Science 's Compass, 16 July, p. [339][1]) responds to my review ( Science 's Compass, 30 Apr., p. [745][2]) of his The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking, New York, 1999) as follows. 1. 1) My review “mires the reader in obscure and misleading factual objections.” Kurzweil attempts a history of computing; in history, facts matter. He challenges only one of my historical objections, concerning the UNIVAC computer. His book, in an entry labeled “1950,” says, “Eckert and Mauchley develop UNIVAC, the first commercially marketed computer. It is used to compile the results of the U.S. census” (p. 269). In fact UNIVAC was under more or less continuous development from 1947; it was not the first commercially marketed computer, nor was it operational until 1951. 2. 2) I “drag out old anti-artificial-intelligence (AI) arguments.” I do not. Rather, I hold that make-believe about basic conceptual issues, such as we find in Kurzweil's book, are hindering AI. 3. 3) I complain “about anthropomorphizing, but there is no harm….” In AI, anthropomorphizing leads to an emphasis on human qualities that are irrelevant to, and a distraction from, the real aims of AI. 4. 4) My review “ignores [the book's] salient arguments….” I do not detect any, only fantasy, Kurzweil's own “laws” of physics, unjustified assertions, and factual errors. His letter is no different. For example, Kurzweil insists that Wittgenstein's Tractatus is about the brain, supporting this with a fallacious argument. In fact, the Tractatus is a technical work of symbolic and philosophical logic and abstract metaphysics and has nothing to say about the brain. Moreover, when Wittgenstein later did discuss the brain, he denied precisely Kurzweil's argument, that to talk about “thinking” or “knowing” is to talk about brain activity. Kurzweil also says that “there is nothing to prevent these efforts [modest connectionist experiments] from scaling up to the entire human brain.” How could he, or anyone else, possibly know this, given the vast discrepancy in scale that is involved (there are perhaps as many as 1014 neurons in the human brain)? [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.285.5426.337g [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.284.5415.745
Anthropomorphism is a common phenomenon known already in ancient times. It is not a thing of the ... more Anthropomorphism is a common phenomenon known already in ancient times. It is not a thing of the past, but still has a profound impact on major aspects of our lives and on research in AI and HRI. Its importance in the field of HRI is emphasized by the hotly-discussed uncanny valley hypothesis. However, in spite of its popularity, the uncanny valley hypothesis lacks empirical evidence. In this paper we suggest that the community should stop trying to fit data to this hypothesis, but rather, based on the available evidence, start talking about the 'uncanny curve'. Moreover, we point out mistakes in the previous studies of the uncanny curve and strongly encourage exploring it in a real HRI for it to be really relevant. We suggest that understanding the opposite process of anthropomorphisation, known as dehumanization, can help to cross the uncanny bottom of the graph.
Scientific American, 1999
Alan Turing's forgotten ideas in computer science. BJ Copeland, Diane Proudfoot Scientific A... more Alan Turing's forgotten ideas in computer science. BJ Copeland, Diane Proudfoot Scientific American 280:44, 98-103, 4/1999. A survey is presented of Alan Turing's virtually unknown work anticipating the current fields of 'connectionism', or neuron-like computational processes. ...
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turing's test vs the moral turing test by diane proudfoot