Answer the following questions:
1. What is the difference between thinking, intelligence (artificial) and consciousness?
2. Will there ever come a time when machines (robots) or computers will possess
human-like thought and conscious awareness (or sentience)?
3. If Cleverbot or some other chatbot was able to fool all of the people
all of the time, would that be proof of sentience or conscious awareness?
“Consciousness is a term that refers to a variety of aspects of the relationship
between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as:
subjectivity; awareness; the ability to experience or to feel; wakefulness; having
a sense of self-hood; or the executive control system of the mind.“
Wikipedia defines Sentience as: the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to
have subjective experiences. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept
to distinguish the ability to think (“reason”) from the ability to feel (“sentience”).
In 1950 Alan Turing devised a test to see if computers are able to “think”. His intent was to see if a program simulating human conversation would be able to fool those interacting with the program. The task is to identify whether the program is human or a computer. The computer successfully “fools” the subject if the subject is unable to tell if he/she is interacting with a computer or human after 5 minutes of “chatting” on the keyboard. If the program is successful in fooling 30% of the subjects (judges), it will have passed the Turing Test. Turing thought the challenge would be met by the year 2000 but no program has succeeded to date. Because the initial challenge did not have a prize, Hugh Loebner, a British mathematician decided to provide some incentive to those attempting to meet the challenge by offering a prize of $100,000. The best attempt each year would win $7000.
