 Hello my friends and welcome to the 25th episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I'm coming to you from outside an airport in Mississippi. I was speaking at a conference here over the weekend and had a grand old time. It's wonderful to be back down south where everybody is nice and it's still sunny even in October. This interview you're about to listen to did not come from Mississippi. In fact, it came from Albany, New York. The topic today I think you guys are going to love talking about artificial intelligence and consciousness. Can machines have minds? And they have consciousness? Or are those even two different things? To help me answer this question I'm talking to Dr. Brahm von Hoivln who comes from Holland so everybody calls him Professor Brahm. He teaches at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute which is known as the oldest tech university in the English speaking world and he's also part of the Mines and Machines program in Cognitive Technology. Now speaking of minds, if you find that your mind is stuck at your university and it's not being exercised in the way that you think it should be because your professors don't know what they're talking about or your fellow students don't know what the heck they're talking about or if you want to avoid the university experience altogether. The sponsor for the show is a company called Praxis which is a company that specializes in taking ambitious young people and training them for the real world. They offer you a six month paid apprenticeship and after you complete the program they'll give you a contractually guaranteed job offer for at least $40,000 a year. Now I spoke with the CEO of this company over the weekend because he was also at this conference and I asked him are you aware of any product that is in existence which contractually guarantees a job offer and he laughed and he said no and nor am I. Now that sounds too good to be true I assure you it isn't and that's why this organization Praxis is exploding in popularity so if you want to be a part of that head over to the website discoverpraxis.com and on their homepage they have a button that says schedule a call. Click it set up an appointment and see if it's right for you. So in addition to having your mind stimulated by the Praxis community I hope that you find the same effect from this interview with Professor Brahm at RPI. Okay so first of all thank you very much for sitting down and talking with me Professor Brahm. Okay well thank you for having this opportunity for me to talk about this I enjoy I really love talking about this material. So I recently got back from a conference when I was in California and when I was there there was a great number of people who were worried about AI there was the AI risk they think this is an existential risk the world might end up being destroyed not by a nuclear holocaust but by from a technological AI revolution and I was trying to follow along with their arguments and I kept getting hung up on one part and that was some claims about the nature of artificial intelligence kind of from a metaphysical perspective so they were talking about computer reasoning in a very similar way that we talk about human reasoning and I'm not sure if that's an accurate way to think about how computers calculate but I don't really know anything about the subject matter so I was hoping you could kind of lay out some of the basics for me when you're thinking about artificial intelligence what are some of the similarities or the differences between computer calculation and human calculation or reasoning. Oh boy that's a difficult question. Well there are a lot of no sub questions in there. So the I can sort of see the issue with this conference that you went to where it's hard for us to think of other kinds of intelligence other than our own and so when we contemplate the idea of computer intelligent machine intelligence it's easy to say oh well it's kind of like our intelligence but more so maybe and maybe that would lead indeed to a kind of now doomsday scenarios that you get because they're like well there's some really bad people in the world doing bad things or making mistakes or maybe these AIs do similar kind of things so I think we kind of extrapolate from our own experience and say oh I mean as humans we're fighting or at least there's tensions and then we flex our muscles and as a species our whole history our whole experience has been one of survival is very important so we again we transfer those notions to I think to AIs as well but who knows maybe AIs have absolutely no interest in any of those concerns that we have as a human experience right so I'm with you I mean that if that was your concern if that was the premise that you were sort of questioning I'm like yeah that's not clear that that's going to happen so even when you talk about that or I think when anybody talks about it we talk about computers as well maybe they wouldn't be interested in such and such is that correct when we talk about you know if I say I'm interested in some particular subject matter that means something that I think is fairly clear to me but does that port over to computer technology of computers be interested in things oh I think at some point they can be you know I'm a believer in the possibility of artificial intelligence for sure that now that we create you know that's possible to create something that we say yeah it has a mind of its own it's it is intelligent you know all the normal things we ascribe to humans in terms of those terms by having a mind you know that we will do this to machines too in fact maybe already are doing some of that. So does that include my conscious awareness and and feeling and and what we might call qualia and subjective experiences? Yeah you have to go to it didn't you? So that is of course you know really tough or now can machines be be conscious you know and like like so many philosophers you know yeah I consciousness is such a difficult one I don't I don't really know what to think about this I I do reject you know the sort of straightforward oh we'll be able to reduce it to brain activity you know we'll see that connection I don't see that you know I don't I don't buy into that you know the typical materialist reductionist story you know nor am I you know a classical dualist you know I don't believe any of this you know soul or spirit stuff but but now there is something indeed something very mysterious about current so what then is this then right I mean we're missing something and so can machines have this you know I see no reasons why they why they can't but I also don't have a good argument that they would have because I just don't understand consciousness you know I spend a good part of my thesis on it and in the end I made no progress. So you think it's at least conceptually possible that we could have something like thinking without consciousness without conscious awareness yeah I think I think that is really quite unproblematic thinking with that yeah I don't think consciousness is an assess is necessary for for thinking or intelligence again you know we we might think it is but you know again that's comes from the human experience and as I said earlier I hinted at you know maybe we we already sort of talk about thinking machines you know touring of course predicted this 50 years ago and and I think he's right I mean we we have gradually started to use that kind of vocabulary all the machine is thinking or it's you know it's you know tentatively but but yeah I gradually you know use that vocabulary of mental mental goings on to machines when they're working away and you know certainly you know memory and you know we have reasoning machines you know we say this machine figures it out you know yeah we I think we already do some of those descriptions no but our current machines conscious I don't know I certainly don't think our conscious in you know to the kind of rich extent that we are you know in fact if I had to say anything no no probably not they're not conscious but they're intelligent to some degree already so let's unpack that a little bit I think this is an excellent example because I'm a chess player and there are the chess machines now beat even the highest rated players in the world substantially and the way that people talk about chess machines is kind of using vocabulary that we that we would use and specifically though there is it's like the nature of calculations calculating this variation this variation it chose this because it thinks this variation is superior but when I use those terminology and I introspect and think about my own mental process when playing chess it has to do with abstraction it has to do with kind of conceptual reasoning that okay the bishop's got to be on the diagonal here is that what's going on with computers though is there any abstract reasoning or is it all just purely mechanical you know logic gates yeah yeah yeah okay so so now you're in here now you're clearly on Alan Turing territory right this is exactly what he responded to he said so many people will will you know object to this notion we're seeing intelligence on the base of that very argument they said well it's it's just you know it's just you know moving symbols around and it's it's just that so how can that be intelligence and you know Turing would say well first of all take the human case you know presumably again unless you're a classical duelist but presumably intelligence comes you know largely from the human brain and you know if you if you zoom in on the on the human brain you see well it's oh it's just you know neural firings you know it's you see something similar there so so why the difference why do we why do we sort of dismiss you know machines as as a candidate for intelligence just because you know it we say well I know how it works right I mean this is this is what was behind the Turing test so hey you mentioned chess so in 1948 Turing wrote so two years before his famous paper you know basically known as the Turing test paper two years before that he wrote sort of a precursor to what we now recognize us as the Turing test or imitation game he said take take you know a not-so-bad chess player a human right take a you know not-so-bad computer program that plays chess and then of course a third person would be the interrogator who you know who is told okay well you're playing against you know these these two entities and and figure out you know in response to your moves and what moves they do in response figure out who's who his whole point behind this this thought experiment right which again we recognize the Turing test but her whole point behind this was of course not a test I'll have a lot more to say about that please please ask me about the Turing test but his whole point of that of that what he actually called a little experiment he said here's a little experiment that showed that illustrates the following point when people know that it's a machine that is doing this right and in particular when they know that there's this fairly simple algorithm right that is as you say merely you know moving symbols around right suddenly we're very unbecome very unwilling to ascribe intelligence to this right but in this kind of little experiment scenario this sort of the more Turing test scenario if we don't know that this is what's going on well now we're much more willing to ascribe intelligence to it because you know we do the same for human chess players of course right where we in a way we don't understand the mechanism right so would it be fair to rephrase this kind of like this that my claim is okay with humans there's this abstraction and conceptual reasoning and that's that's what I'm calling intelligence computers they don't have that therefore there isn't intelligence and what Turing is doing is saying well hang on why do you claim the first place that there is this additional stuff going on with humans it's not that the computers lack something is that the humans might actually lack what you think is there well to be clear I think I think a human chess player does something different you know approaches the problem differently than than a chess computer the chess computers now can consider far more moves than a human chess player will and they do use like you say abstractions you know much more abstract considerations of positions and you know sort of you know hate the left side on the board looks weak or you know things like that so I mean there are different approaches right but but before we go into that yes the other part what you just said is exactly correct right Turing said we we want to believe right that there's something special about human intelligence now that goes beyond mere well basic computation right and Turing's point was no even in a human case it's not the brain is in essence just a computational device that's what it is and really it in right it is oh what was his clothes it is unimaginative donkey work right that is sort of now behind this or below this that underlies this and there really isn't anything more right so but again his point was we're sort of if we know what the mechanism is we're suddenly unwilling to say that is intelligence anymore right so so there's a number of points one is we don't really know what intelligence is Turing said so we don't really know what it is right yet we all use this words right we all describe it to each other as humans right so at the very least let's try to be fair about this that and by the way I excite intelligence to other humans because mostly on the base of their behavior right I don't I don't open up your skull and go like oh you know I see you're very intelligent look what I'm but I'm discovering here right no I don't do that at all I wouldn't even know what to say if I open up your skull and see what's going on in your brain right but so if we describe intelligence on the basis of behavior in our interactions the whole point of the Turing test is then we should do the same thing for machines right okay whatever intelligence means or is right at least be let's try to be fair in our usage of the language so let's grant that word let's say it is the case unequivocally just for the sake of argument that machines can have intelligence it's kind of a it's kind of an ambiguous word but whatever it is they have it mm-hmm there's still this other thing going on which is the abstraction so when I when we're talking about you know Magnus Carlson who's best chess player in the world when we say there's is there something fundamentally different going on in the mental processes of a human than there is a computer so is there when we talk about abstraction what is that metaphysically you know it is what is going on in Magnus Carlson is what is going on now when he thinks is it is it something other than computation Alan Turing would say no and I'm one who's who's inclined to believe no I believe that that it it all reduces to computation again they all leave consciousness aside right but as far as information processing goes in the answer that's all computation so in that sense there's no fundamental difference okay but within computation of course you have many different architectures right you have the classicals or a logic-based architecture you got your neural network kind of architecture dynamical system architecture and even if even if you do use classical architectures you know you can do the the total you know brute search approach you know that many chess computers are using right but you can throw in you know more heuristics right and again every time you get a different a different architecture a different algorithm a different approach of doing so and in that yes I don't think a chess computer is like a human chess player there are differences on that but when you reduce it down to the fundamental metaphysical what's going on it is the same so in principle we could construct a computer that had some structure whereby you would get what we call abstraction yes I believe is true and of course the argument is all of cognition seems to be information processing at least can be looked at in such a way and memory storage of information reasoning inferring information decision-making now taking into account all this information and now doing further inference and if we can if we can characterize cognition as information processing and computers right if there are anything there are information processors right so there's a bit of a distributed middle there computers are information processors you know cognition information processing of course that doesn't in itself doesn't show that cognition reduces to computation right but Turing yet again Turing in his 1936 paper right of the Turing computer showed that basically all information processing can be done by a Turing computer right he basically showed us look you can get enormously complicated information processing abilities from a Turing machine which is a thing made of very simple components very dumb components right but you put enough of them together and you do enough operations you will get any level of information processing out of that right so that then may now becomes actually a strong argument that okay so even our cognitive abilities if they're just information processing abilities are Turing they should be Turing computable this this should be within reach I'm going to ask a question that's going to bring us back to the consciousness thing but indirectly so when we're identifying different things that exist it's usually we identify things you could say from the outside so when I'm looking at objects I look at you what they look like their form their shape whatever and I assign them a label this is a little bit different when we're talking about living things so what distinguishes you know a cat from some other type of animal well its behavior we start talking about how the how does the thing act and then we categorize it but it seems like with these mental phenomena we're not really categorizing things from the outside we're almost categorizing it from the inside that's that's the way it appears to me when I say what am I and am I fundamentally a computer I could say okay well when I look at the machine I got all these parts moving yeah okay but there seems to be that thing lacking which is what's on the inside that's what you're talking about but it still does I would say I guess maybe what I would say is when identifying specifically what I'm calling abstraction so when I conceive of a concept and it's there I'm thinking about position in regards to chess it seems like that identification is internal I'm saying it because I have some kind of internal awareness of it that nobody from the outside necessarily could see if they dissected my brain they're not going to see the abstract conception of position in chess well that is not clear the last part that's not clear to me that we would write if write that a complete neuroscience would not be able to say oh well you know I see you're approaching this problem you're trying to think about they could see the the actual abstraction as I see it as I not as your consciously not as your consciously experience it right but what we might say is oh you're you use this particular kind of computational approach to solve this problem of picking the best chess move yes but even when we identify it as this computational approach isn't that still something from the outside so I totally grant it is but then what am I talking about when I'm talking about the inside you're talking about consciousness well I don't know so this is kind of a good way of getting back to the first question I ask you because when I'm thinking about maybe artificial intelligence isn't the right word but when I'm thinking about the mind can you have the mind as I'm referencing it as from the internal perspective on a computer if that's a fundamental part of the equation is that internalness then my inclination is to think well that how could you possibly get that you can't even see it you can't even see it from the outside it's just that that internal perspective yeah no I understand but but just as I said you can have intelligence without consciousness I totally believe you can have minds without consciousness I have no problem with that whatsoever right I'm perfectly willing to describe minds to things without knowing that they even are conscious I mean of course the same is true of you I don't even know if you are conscious you will claim to be conscious oh interesting so then what when you're conceiving of a mind you're not adding the consciousness into the equation you're saying there's data processing there's abstraction but it's all grounded in the physical firings and the neurons you're not even saying though the awareness the feeling the subjective part of it from for that's right that's right interesting now when you say that though I can totally get on board with that when you say that it pushes me into something like a dualism because I say well hang on a second I have this other thing yeah doesn't that mean that there's something else going on here there's some other I need to explain this well I mean materialism dualism are not the only options okay and by the way when you when you say I'm okay I mean there's property dualism you know and y'all tell Mary and you know new dualism is really quite different from you know the kind of classical Cartesian dualism so I mean there's there's so many so many positions to hold can we dive in that into that a little bit because I'd like to know okay yeah just surface level yes if we're saying that mental phenomena can be completely reduced to physical phenomena however there is in addition to mental phenomena there is conscious awareness what is the what are some better explanations than saying okay that conscious awareness is a soul that happens to be inside of a machine well so I think part of that the best answer that I came up with I forgot to consciousness and I really don't proclaim to have the answer and I'm as confused as everybody and anybody who says I know the answer I think it is it's confused too really we should all be confused about this it so anyway the sort of conclusion or you know tentative position I reach is I think a big part of the answer is is indeed now what what is this physical thing right so we used to have a fairly clear conception of now what what is physics right it's something tangible we conceded as sort of you know tangible stuff I can grasp but I can you know paint it I can kick it right and of course in modern physics you know it's like well what happened to that right and the question becomes well what what what doesn't even mean to say something is physical and the best answer I could reach that you know to answer that is is when we refer to something as as physical I think well what we're saying really here is it's something that that seems like a couple but you know something that that's that's physicist you know we study you know just like you know it's a kind of a perspective we we take on the world right it's we bring to bear certain concepts and perspectives on the world and that perspective is physical perspective right so when you say something is physical we basically I think we're saying right I can take that perspective and make sense of consciousness that to me is never going to work right because whether it's physical biological chemical anything scientific remember that is third person that is objective we say right we demand in science that our observation be well the things are publicly observable what is that mean as we all know my experience is is a construction right I don't perceive reality as it is nor do you not as anybody right what I experience is a construction of presumably due to my brain we don't quite know how it is but what is clear we don't see reality as it is right and so when two scientists stand next to each other and point to the same thing right they point and they both have their hands out and they point to something I say do you see that and the other one says yes I see that too it seems like it's publicly observable right but they don't directly see the same thing right so how then is something publicly how is that even possible for things to be publicly observable I think my best answer is because when I say do you see right are there three three chairs in the room right you say yes there are and I say yes I see those three chairs too because we mean something different well whatever your experience is that right now you're having looking around the room right there's there's a certain structure there's there's certain abstractions that you have learned to make from your experience right that tell you you know that make you say yes there are three chairs I see three chairs and I do the same thing even though our experiences may of course be completely different right so in other words all of science right is in a way an abstraction of course it is it's a description right all science is a description but even when we say it's physical it's a perspective right and that perspective only gets us a an abstract description of reality but an abstract description reality again works well to you know reduce chemistry itself to physics and and explain things like life because those are those are all abstractions too those are all that's all about functionality composition just the kind of things you can indeed reduce to each other and you know and be have a third person perspective on but consciousness just is that's a first person thing we can't abstract consciousness from consciousness right it's it's the one thing that's there right as deca was really clear about this it's the one thing I'm certain of its existence right anything else who knows right that might not even be there now I'm I'm a realist I believe that there is a physical world or at least there there is a world independent of I think I'm not a solipsism ideal is anything like that but what we say is physical only captures some of that world right and consciousness it can't capture it's just I agree with you that's a very radical claim I mean that to me this this takes the default philosophy of scientific materialism that I think people are very comfortable with and that kind of turns it on its head when you're saying that consciousness is something that by its nature is almost not even open to scientific investigation or it's a category mistake to view it as that would seem to be the implication yeah it's I mean not that we can't study consciousness of course we can we can bring the subjects to the lab and do things to them and then you know and then we can you know and then they will report on their you know their conscious experiences and as such you know we can come to know lots of things about consciousness but only sort of indirectly we can only come to know how consciousness is associated to all those different physical conditions and circumstances right but what consciousness is we're not really getting it right so it's not clear that we can ever get to it so in terms of coming back to the mind and artificial intelligence what is so I'm still looking for a more palatable alternative than the soul really yeah yeah yeah no uh I mean the soul is it's always seen as a thing like this ingredient that you sort of you know put into this body you're sort of yeah it's a person it's a being that yeah that it's me right life was always seen like this too right life was this vital force now you right you and I have it inside of us and you know rocks don't you know exactly you know that's all that's all pretty silly right right and of course we say there's no fight vital soul now of course the the the uh eliminativists say ah and same for consciousness right the consciousness is like the vital soul and now of course that I say no no no no no consciousness we do know exists right there is a difference between consciousness and a vital force right the vital force was just a mistake that there is such a thing but consciousness right again as Dekert said that we're absolutely certain of um so but but what then is that it's um I have some sympathy to you know charm was kind of new dualism where he says well it's and which is really a kind of property dualism right he says look there's still only one kind of thing it's still a kind of a monist position in terms of maybe substance right but you know but we have these physical properties again these abstract properties of functionality composition that we can study through the normal sciences right so when we reveal those you know we can call those are physical properties but then there's other properties to this to this thing right that makes up the universe right whatever that is right and those would be the well the non physical properties you know maybe what he calls the the phenomenal properties right so consciousness would be on that side of the coin I don't know if I'm a property dualist either because again you know I think there's something because because if you say you know if you say well the phenomenal and the physical are both properties of the same thing you sort of put consciousness on the same level if you want this physics and I say consciousness in a way is more fundamental it really is right where physics to me is an abstraction right so I see a difference I don't know if I want to be a property dualist either it starts to sound like more like an idealism again right yeah it does right that all the physical comes from the the consciousness but that gets too I that gets too quickly into solipses and I don't want to get I want to be a realist there is something that exists clearly outside of me thinking about real so what do you think about something like this that in terms of what we're certain of consciousness is a real fundamental phenomena in the universe yes we have reason to believe that in addition to the existence of that phenomena there's also something that we've labeled as physicalness which is there seems to be this so I have the conscious experience of there being some kind of three-dimensional existence right I have a visual feel and if I'm aware of it I think okay well there's there seems to be this space and there's these little things that occupy that space now it might be the case that all that's just made up in my mind just complete solipsism I don't know maybe but it seems reasonable to believe that in addition to my consciousness there is some other thing out there and that there's a there's some kind of causal interface between the two right so it seems to be the case that if I bump into a chair I have the conscious awareness of it yeah and if you know if I want to move the chair then it seems like that external world moves around so there seems to be that meaningful external and we and we talk about consciousness right now we're debating consciousness so so so we're we're clearly doing something with consciousness right it clearly has causal force right and that of course is makes the idea that oh I can sort of talk about minds and intelligence just in computational term is sort of now pushing consciousness on the side it does make me nervous sometimes I'm like is that can I really do this I mean cognitive science and most cognitive scientists practice cognitive science do the same thing they sort of put consciousness on the side they're like oh let me just study reason let me just study perception action decision making problem solving etc right from the computational kind of perspective and sort of disregard consciousness here we might be making a mistake there I don't know so I really don't claim to have the answer about consciousness it is a real doozy to me I'm a real mind-boggling I am flabbergasted about how to even think about well good then I feel better about it because I'm in the exact same boat so you'd mentioned before that you have a lot of thoughts on the Turing test when we're trying to identify what type some things exist in the world are their conscious things or their intelligent things Alan Turing came up with a very famous example of how we could try to judge or label whether or not something is intelligent or not so can you talk a little bit about that yeah okay so so we refer to this as the Turing test as I mentioned earlier right the Turing that his precursor from two years ago looks nothing like the tour like the tour well it it is the Turing that it clearly is a precursor to the Turing test we don't get the idea oh this is a test Turing puts us forward as a test no this was Turing's way of making a point to illustrate a kind of a prejudice right kind of biases on people's side in that that would you know be in a way against the idea of machine intelligence and I still regard the Turing test as such so in fact I don't want to call the Turing test a test at all right people after Turing or once Turing sort of got these ideas out there I think a lot of people took that to be a test I think Turing himself sort of started to run with that idea too if you look at his later you know comments he started to take seriously that maybe okay maybe this is kind of a test but initially it wasn't and I think that is the best way to look at the imitation I always urge my students I don't want to hear Turing tests what I want to hear is imitation game and what the imitation game is again it's a thought experiment to show to us people look you guys you have this prejudice against the notion of machine intelligence just because you think it's all it's made of metal and wires you know it can be intelligence or just because it's just merely shuffling numbers and symbols it can be intelligence right he wanted to like oh here's a good way to think about this we've all we all know the kind of stories where you know say a girl tries you know wants to be on the baseball team the boys baseball team and and the boys say oh you're a girl you can't play baseball you're not allowed on the team and of course what does he do he dresses up like a boy right and of course does the tryouts and of course he's great he gets on the team and you know and the team of course wins the championship he probably has the winning hit and they hoist her up in the air and her cap falls up and out come the long hairs and oh my goodness it's a girl and now we're sort of shamed into saying oh I guess right now we have to eat dirt right it's like oh I guess I guess girls complete baseball after all like I think that was Turing's point of the imitation game he wanted us to eat dirt right that sort of we're being revealed oh no we're sort of being caught in describing intelligence is something and then oh oh but it was a machine oh oh right I've never heard this before that's actually that I think that's an excellent point but it does make me think that perhaps what's going on is people like myself are interjecting consciousness into intelligence so that's why we say well it can't be you know machines the wires the metal wires they can't have intelligence because what is intelligence includes this additional thing so maybe it was justification that's the way I kind of look at I understand that right but here's the other point at Turing definitely in his 1950 his famous paper May 2 right he said I believe in about 50 years time the use of language will have changed so much that we are comfortable with this term you know thinking machines right and that is a really important point and I think he proved to be exactly right about this as I mentioned you know I think we are starting to use that kind of vocabulary right now maybe we still kind of put it in quotes right but I think Turing's point would have been look again the imitation game if it was if it was any kind of test at all it was clearly it only tests for human intelligence right but what we need to do is to have a much broader view on this knowledge of intelligence right so first of all there may be many kinds of intelligence right yeah so just like you know we now realize you know Pluto isn't your typical planet right and so we start calling it a dwarf planet right maybe we need these different gradations of intelligence different kinds of intelligence maybe right that would actually make sense to move towards that right a lot of people again take this this imitation game as a test right and then subsequently they they object to it to criticize it and they're like oh but you know it's too easy to deceive the interrogator right it is really not a great test right right right right there there's so many things that are just left completely left unspecified who is the interrogator what are the questions about how long does it take place all that is left unspecified now Turing was now dummy right he realizes this is not a scientifically respectable way of going about intelligence right and so no he didn't I don't believe this that he really proposes at least not initially as any kind of practical test for intelligence right no way yeah I'm glad you brought that up because I just saw some article the other day a news article about some researcher created a chat program that oh my gosh it passed the Turing passed the Turing test well see and here's exactly what happens and I predicted this 15 years ago I said look because it's such a vague test right it's not going to be any kind of momentous event now when something is in fact claimed to and it's exactly what happened right we had this Eugene Guzman that was sort of this chat thing chat bot right that presumably passed this Turing test and and I guess it satisfied certain criteria that I lay down right so but now was this is this huge thing in the world that like oh my god we got now we got intelligent machines now singularity is coming right you know the AI community was mostly you know fairly dismissive about this right it's just not a big thing because it's such a vague criteria see unlike say like self-driving cars right it's very clear when we have this autonomous thing that drives a car exactly and we got it and that was a momentous event you know and like chess again very clear Watson playing Jeopardy very clear criteria you don't have this with with Turing so again I don't think he was trying to put forward a test that's just nonsense that's what we made out of it when he lays out his his imitation game in the paper right if his point was to lay out an actual test you'd expect that in his paper he would address a lot of objections to the test as an actual test yeah and in the paper he goes over a long list of what he calls objections to the main question but what are those objections to not to the test they're objections to the idea of artificial intelligence period right in fact he really doesn't address this whole test and how good it might be or might not be as a test he doesn't do this at all this was not Turing did not see this as his contribution right he again just wanted to stick to the point okay what about artificial intelligence so there's really two-step part to Turing's argument that yes machines can be intelligent so again the first one is goes back to his Turing machines he says all of information processing can be done computationally and that's really all the cognition is there's a second part is and I think theirs were really imitation game came in why he put that in it is because even when all the facts are in when we know exactly what machines are not capable of we are still faced with the question but is it intelligent we will still be asking that question this is not going to be settled by doing these kind of experiments not any kind of test right rather his point was it is up to us humans to decide whether or not we want to apply this label intelligence to these things or not and that is the decision we have to make that is not something we can observe we right we can measure this and go like this is now a fact that they are intelligent right this is not a factual matter this is something we have to decide and and there's an important point right this is a lot of flesh I've made the analogy with flight here right we have to decide whether artificial flight now the airplanes was real flight or not right because someone might have said great example birds flap airplanes don't so it's not real flying right but we realize no they're they're way too many similarities between birds and airplanes to put the airplanes in the category of really flying things so the same is going to happen according to touring with intelligence right these machines are going to become things that start to behave in ways that can solve problems can reason can all those things that it is only going to make sense and it will be perfectly natural and normal to say here's a thinking something that's an excellent point but it makes me think somebody that I don't have a lot of background in artificial intelligence but in hearing this it makes me think they're a great deal of the confusion and the arguments come down to how are we going to use language yes really just what does intelligent actually mean because when you get the flight example I could imagine lots of people making very long-winded arguments about how planes don't actually fly what that is how I like to put it yeah forget about the word intelligence right for one it's a low deterrent right let me say this thing is intelligent that thing is not intelligent it is not just again it's not just about what they can and cannot do now there's a judgment there's a value judgment in there right the intelligent thing is somehow important has value right y'all need to be respected you know maybe has rights you know things like that but the non-intelligence somehow you know we were sort of dismissive about right so it's a very low term right and and we realize this too I think and this was one of the biases of course that I think Turing put his finger on right that that you know of course as humans you know we don't want to give up our our pedestal left you know of you know the super intelligent being so as long as we can you know hold off on saying well here's another thing a completely different kind of thing that is also intelligent as long as we can do this even if this is just unconsciously we will do this right so how much if you think so maybe the best way is to is but maybe one way is to get rid of this word intelligence a low deterrent right also it refers to a whole family of things right just like mind right mind itself too it's it's equally problematic does something have a mind or not it's not a yes or no kind of a thing right we could be referring to again the reasoning decision-making memory perception action right so you can have all kinds of minds right and it's not a linear kind of a thing too we sometimes think of intelligence as sort of this one-dimensional scale you know with humans on top right you know rocks at the bottom and you know and then come ants and then dogs no it's a multi-dimensional thing with you know where some people are better at this one thing other people are better than the other thing and then when you throw in animals and we throw in machines you hit completely different spots in this multi-dimensional landscape so let me ask you then kind of in resolution if a great deal of this has to do with the use of language which i think it does yes then perhaps really ultimately the reason that so many people would object to artificial intelligence in principle has to do with specifically consciousness because i think when people are saying like i think few people would object that you can get behavior of intelligence you can get action you can get output of what we would otherwise call intelligence but that critical thing that is they would say fundamentally always going to be lacking is the consciousness do you think that maybe that's why because we can't play the language card there no i understand right right right because again consciousness is just a fact right uh there's consciousness there or or not um yeah but again i don't know if you're conscious or not yet i i think you are right i i i look at your behavior right i see somebody use that word right and i think the same is going right if we get this machine or robot out there right and it and it just behaves just like us right and it starts talking about consciousness and it it's you know it will start interviewing you know some philosophy professor about yeah what about consciousness you know what is this thing that i have you know that i'm not even sure that you have right um then i say probably it does have consciousness right i think that's an excellent note to end on um so thanks so much for talking to me this has been great oh you're welcome thank you sure okay so that was my interview with professor brahm i hope you guys enjoyed it as always there's just so much more to talk about with these complex issues and if you enjoyed that interview could you do me a favor could you go to itunes or stitcher and leave a rating and a review makes a big difference and it will help keep the show running if you really like this interview if you really like the content i'm producing you can also check out patreon.com slash steve paterson you can help become a contributor to the show just by pitching in a dollar when a new episode is released that's all for me i hope you guys have a fantastic week