Salon Artificial stupidity, Part 2

"If Hugh Loebner's contest is just hokum, and the Turing test has outlived its usefulness, why should we care about it or its various squabbling participants?

A vocal camp in the brainy "philosophy of mind" profession believes that the Turing test should be relegated to the history books, but I'm going to assert axiomatically that the test, as it is generally understood by ordinary humans like you and me, is interesting. The question of whether computers can successfully pose as human beings has obsessed writers, filmmakers and computer scientists for decades. Therefore, without getting sucked into a philosophical vortex about the nature of minds, machines, intelligence and so forth, all we need to find out -- if we want to know if the Loebner competition matters -- is whether there exists a more respectable variant of the Turing test. As far as I can determine, there doesn't. The Turing test is, as it were, state-of-the-art."

The Third Culture FRANCISCO VARELA: The Emergent Self

"Francisco Varela died on May 28 at his home in Paris"

"Francisco, an experimental and theoretical biologist, studied what he termed "emergent selves" or "virtual identities." His was an immanent view of reality, based on metaphors derived from self-organization and Buddhist-inspired epistemology rather than on those derived from engineering and information science. He presented a challenge to the traditional AI view that the world exists independently of the organism, whose task is to make an accurate model of that world - to "consult" before acting. His nonrepresentationalist world - or perhaps "world-as-experienced" - has no independent existence but is itself a product of interactions between organisms and environment."

N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics

"Here, at the inaugural moment of the computer age, the erasure of embodiment is performed so that "intelligence" becomes a property of the formal manipulation of symbols rather than enaction in the human lifeworld. The Turing test was to set the agenda for artificial intelligence for the next three decades. In the push to achieve machines that can think, researchers performed again and again the erasure of embodiment at the heart of the Turing test. All that mattered was the formal generation and manipulation of informational patterns. Aiding this process was a definition of information, formalized by Claude Shannon and Norbert Wiener, that conceptualized information as an entity distinct from the substrates carrying it. From this formulation, it was a small step to think of information as a kind of bodiless fluid that could flow between different substrates without loss of meaning or form."

"Think of the Turing test as a magic trick. Like all good magic tricks, the test relies on getting you to accept at an early stage assumptions that will determine how you interpret what you see later. The important intervention comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman."