[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I want to talk about Alan Turing’s extremism. I found one kind of extreme quote but I think it’s more or less correct. I’m saying this extreme even compared to some of the most let’s say zany or even “rational” extreme position of some futurists. So the quote is “This is only a foretaste of what is to come and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities but I do not see why it should not enter any of the fields normally covered by the human intellect and eventually compete on equal terms.”
Rick Rosner: Alan Turing I think must have been born before World War I, right? He helped Britain win World War II and then he was driven to suicide in the 1950s, right?
Jacobsen: He was June 23, 1912 to June 7, 1954.
Rosner: Wow! So he was not even 42 when he died, which is crazy. And he’s saying this stuff at least 70 years ago; I mean when there was barely anything that you could call a computer. So yeah, he saw a whole landscape the entire human enterprise being disrupted before there was jack shit to do any disrupting. So it’s a shame that he was hounded because it was illegal I think to be gay in Britain at the time. He was, as far as I know, well adjustedly gay especially for the time, where he wasn’t particularly closeted except where he needed to be professionally as far as I know. Like, he’d go on vacations to Mykonos and stuff where there were a lot of like-minded dudes and he’d just have dude time. What happened was he’d been with a male hustler and the hustler ripped him off and he filed a police report and then that led to the police figuring out that it was a gay thing and there were consequences because you couldn’t be gay and working in National Security back then because you were thought to be a blackmail risk from foreign spies. The upshot of it was that he had to consent to be chemically castrated which involved I think probably taking a shit ton of estrogen and he hated what the estrogen was doing to him.
I probably got like 60% of the details wrong except that I know that eventually he just put cyanide on an apple and ate the apple and it’s a shame because this guy not only won World War II but understood the future better than anybody else at the time. That might be an exaggeration but not by much.
Jacobsen: I found another quote.
Rosner: Is this the more extreme one?
Jacobsen: I found it but I give that one as the third one. It’s from 1951. “It is customary… to offer a grain of comfort in the form of a statement that some peculiarly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine… I cannot offer any such comfort for I believe that no such bounds can be set.”
Rosner: That’s ah freaking crazy because he’s one of the fathers of computing and huge in the realm of not just theoretical but he figured out how to crack the German Enigma coding machine. So he was tremendously practical but also super theoretical with the Turing test. He did theoretical work showing that a step by step computer is barely computer that could just flip zeros to ones based on a set of simple rules could compute anything given enough time. The pocket calculator was still 20 years away. Transistors were freaking five or seven years away. At best he was working with vacuum tubes, the integrated circuit was 20 years in the field and he’s coming to these conclusions not because he was a science fiction guy but because he was a fucking theoretical computing guy.
Jacobsen: And the quote that I came across where I’ve never seen such an extreme statement, especially from someone with such an authoritative identity in history and it goes, “It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control”
Rosner: That’s crazy. He’s thought to come out of the early 1950s and from somebody who’s not a science fiction writer. The idea that they would sharpen their wit through by conversing is in a nutshell what AI does to sharpen its widths. It freaking gets big data and works its way through a shit ton of data which is in a way like having a billion conversations and getting pretty good at conversing via absorbing though you could still argue not really understanding a billion conversations. I mean critics of being scared of AI now are all saying it can it can simulate but it doesn’t really understand but the path will be to simulate understanding better and better until it’s the equivalent of our understanding because as we’ve talked about, our consciousness and our understanding is in essence a simulation of some true understanding that can’t exist. There’s not like some magic Cartesian fluid beyond the real world that bestows thinking with its magic that we understand via simulating understanding to a high degree.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 