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Originally Posted by andyh2000
I don't understand the objection that AI can never be 'proper' intelligence because it doesn't have squishy bits, neurotransmitter chemicals etc.
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That's not the objection at all.
Quote:
Originally Posted by andyh2000
Individual neurons in our brains aren't intelligent but we call the overall system a mind. I don't see why a computer shuffling bits should be any different.
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No, it's a brain. We don't know what a mind is, nor exactly what intelligence is. A "mind" is a philosophical construct.
But nothing in computer neural networks has anything to do with how biological neurons work. It's a marketing term.
Computers don't work in the same way as any brain, though we don't exactly know why brains work we do know exactly how computers work. Bits are just how numbers are stored in a computer. Everything is reduced to either bit states (Set membership, flags, boolean values), integers or clever approximation of floating point numbers using an integer for magnitude and another for the most significant digits.
Images are 1 (fax or other line at a time scans), 2 or n dimensional arrays of point brightness and hue (RGB, or YUV and optionally transparency).
All programs could be implemented (very slowly) in theory with paper tapes or cards and machinery using any kind of mechanical power source, though the cost and size would be prohibitive.
The first modern computer that worked in a similar way to current silicon chip based computers was made in about 1939 by Konrad Zuse using mechanical relays*. Fortunately the German Government and Military wasn't interested. He went on to found a computer company in Switzerland after WWII.
The Turing Test isn't important to AI, and can be beaten for a naive human. Chatbots will be improved and likely will consistently pass it. Some humans might fail. It was simply an idea and never a real test of AI, as no-one then or since could adequately define intelligence. OTOH, the Turing Machine was a serious piece of mathematics. All useful general purpose programmable computers are a more limited form of Turing machine:
"Many machines that might be thought to have more computational capability than a simple universal Turing machine can be shown to have no more power (Hopcroft and Ullman p. 159, cf. Minsky (1967)). They might compute faster, perhaps, or use less memory, or their instruction set might be smaller, but they cannot compute more powerfully (i.e. more mathematical functions). (The Church–Turing thesis hypothesizes this to be true for any kind of machine: that anything that can be "computed" can be computed by some Turing machine.)"
"The difference lies only with the ability of a Turing machine to manipulate an unbounded amount of data. However, given a finite amount of time, a Turing machine (like a real machine) can only manipulate a finite amount of data."
In one sense a true Turing machine can't be built, because the Turing machine has infinite storage space. However as much storage as needed for a given real problem or program can be added. All the world's internet data on hard drives is estimated to be only the size of an oil tanker if gathered to one place.
Also there is no great range of AI systems.
* A relay can easily implement Not, Or and And, the building blocks of all digital computers, though Nand (And with inverted output) and Nor (Or with inverted output) are the usual building blocks. Absolutely nothing more is needed. A memory cell can be interconnected gates to make a Flip-Flop, though now a stored charge is often used, a solid state version of magnetic core stores.