Are robots getting smarter or are humans dumbing down?
With the news that a chatbot named Eugene Goostman has been able to convince a number of people that it’s a real person, researchers are calling this achievement "one of the most exciting moments in the field of artificial intelligence.“ In reality it’s not that big of a deal, but it does tell us something about those judging Eugene.
Some have suggested Eugene’s success could be put down to British politeness. Apparently, the judges, who were all based in London, were told that Eugene was a 13-year-old boy from Ukraine, and that English was his second language. Considering the test was only five minutes long, it’s hardly unsurprising that only a few were so bold as to call the boy a robot.
A more robust explanation – perhaps they just weren’t paying attention. Eugene is not a piece of super-smart technology. In reality, it’s just a piece of software cleverly designed to fool humans – "making use of psychological smoke and mirrors" – just long enough to pass the test, according to software engineer David Auerbach. Rather than displaying intelligence, the software launches a series of “ploys” that skirt over its limitations, almost like a magician performing a sleight of hand. It’s simple misdirection – and all that it reveals, says Gary Marcus, a professor of cognitive science at NYU, is "the ease with which we can fool others.”
So why were those judges so easily fooled? While they may have wanted to be done with the blasted Turing test, which has haunted AI researchers for six decades, the likelihood really is that they just weren’t paying close attention. As Nicholas Carr in The Shallows explains, the human capacity to focus has been replaced by a culture of scanning and skimming in a constant state of distractedness, rather than mindfulness, where our communication is terse, short and functional. In a world where text messages are the dominant means of human-to-human interaction, it's unsurprising that we can be easily be tricked into thinking a robot is a person.
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