Fair play for machines: Chomsky's misreading of Turing, and why it matters.

Abstraction: Chomsky misreads Turing's imitation game as dismissing machine intelligence

Key points:

• Chomsky misinterprets Turing's "can machines think is too meaningless to deserve discussion" as pessimism about AI; Turing actually meant the question invokes metaphysical confusion, not that AI is unimportant
• Turing's real motivation was "fair play for machines" — filtering human prejudice so machine intelligence can be judged by the same criteria as human intelligence
• The original imitation game was a gendered parlor game; Turing's constructivist view was that "intelligence" and "gender" are socially negotiated categories, not objective criteria
• Chomsky claims 40 years of AI research gave "no insight into the nature of thought" — author argues AI/CS reshaped the entire structure of human knowledge about cognition
• Watson beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy is exactly the kind of evidence Turing predicted would vindicate treating machines as intelligent agents
• Turing's framework anticipates multi-agent systems: machines as social participants in human games, judged fairly by the same standards

Connections: Noam Chomsky · Alan Turing · Turing Test · Philosophy Of Mind · Artificial Intelligence

Source: http://digitalinterface.blogspot.in/2013/12/chomskys-misreading-of-turing-and-why.html