The idea of whether human like intelligence can be achieved using a compute simulation or Artificial Intelligence is not a new question. But how would we know when a computer had achieved human-like intelligence? Alan Turing, the man many consider to be the father of modern digital computing posited a solution to this question decades before digital computing became ubiquitous in our world. Turing created the machines that cracked the German codes in World War II. He died in 1954, two years before I was born. Turing posed a test to determine if a computer could be classed as intelligent. It came to be known as the Turing test
“At it’s essence, the Turing test is test for intelligence in a computer, requiring that a human being should be unable to distinguish the machine from another human being by using the replies to questions put to both.”
We know computers excel at calculations. But can they reason?
In 1997, an IBM computer called Deep Blue beat the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. In 2013, another IBM computer, named Watson, beat two Jeopardy champions Despite those accomplishments, no-one claimed that they had passed the Turing test.
But in 2014 it was reported that a chatbot passed the test at an event held at the university of Reading, it was developed by 3 Russian programmers and was called “Eugene Goostman”.
We all saw a demo a few years back where’s Google’s AI ran a chat where it carried on a realistic conversation. Reportedly, Google’s Deep Mind later fooled at least one of its engineers who declared it “sentient”.
For the past few weeks, our imagination has been captivated by an artificial intelligence bot called ChatGPT. It’s a surprisingly realistic AI that can write write computer programs, answer questions and even write poetry and songs. There has been the requisite hysteria – will humans be replaced by it?
To sort out the hype and to figure out where things go from here, I invited Josh Tyson, co-author of the Age of Invisible Machines to talk about ChatGPT and the future of AI in business.
We covered serious topics and Josh had a unique view of how we should see Artificial Intelligence, but we also had some fun with this using ChatGPT to write parts of the script for this episode.
As always, if you have any comments or suggestions for guests and topics, we’d love to hear from you.
