Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1502623
8 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2023 Nolan's Notes by Nolan Johnson, I-CONNECT007 The Turing Test You can't escape it even if you try: Main- stream media coverage of artificial intelligence (AI) is everywhere. Reporters and editors are tossing all sorts of requests at ChatGPT, Bing AI, and the like, then reporting on what they get back for results. You see typical themes like, "ChatGPT will take away your job," or the media reporting on music awards that explicitly forbid AI-gen- erated music and lyrics. A large chunk of the coverage points out that the results of an AI request are too simplistic or even erroneous. at has us concerned, but remember, we heard the same concerns back in the 1970s, when robotic arms first rolled onto the fac- tory floor. ose robots didn't take away all the jobs, they just shied the skill sets. It didn't take long for the workers to realize that the robots merely did tedious tasks; it still took people to make sure things ran correctly. e robots weren't really smart, and they couldn't do what humans could. Has anything changed? Is generative AI smart? How does this affect us in the EMS industry? at's what this month's issue of SMT007 Mag- azine is about. Have you heard of the Turing test? Computer pioneer Alan Turing proposed that a computer program should be considered able to "think" if a human interacting with the program in natural language was unable to tell whether they were communicating with a human or a machine. Turing proposed this test in a 1950 paper published by Computing Machinery and Intelligence. ere are a multitude of sources for the development of the Turing test, but Wikipedia is concise: "In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor and computer scientist at MIT, created a pro- gram which appeared to pass the Turing test. e program, known as ELIZA, worked by examining a user's typed comments for key- words. If a keyword is found, a rule that trans- forms the user's comments is applied, and the resulting sentence is returned. If a keyword is not found, ELIZA responds either with a generic riposte or by repeating one of the ear- lier comments. In addition, Weizenbaum devel- oped ELIZA to replicate the behavior of a Rog- erian psychotherapist, allowing ELIZA to be 'free to assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world.' With these tech- niques, Weizenbaum's program was able to fool some people into believing that they were talk- ing to a real person."