{"id":768,"date":"2022-10-30T12:56:18","date_gmt":"2022-10-30T17:56:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/?p=768"},"modified":"2023-04-04T18:50:33","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T22:50:33","slug":"revisiting-the-turing-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/2022\/10\/30\/revisiting-the-turing-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Lecture Write-up: Revisiting the Turing Test"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are a few different ways we might understand this claim. On the one hand, there is a tremendous amount of contemporary interest in Alan Turing, with acclaimed films such as The Imitation Game\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Ex Machina\u00a0<\/em>reflecting the magnetic pull of his life and research in popular culture. On the other hand, we find ourselves in a world shot through with algorithms. What started with the Turing machine has culminated with the thorough entanglement of our lives with computational processes, many of which are beyond our control or understanding. What is the significance of that fact? To take up this question, Professor Floyd directs our attention back to Turing\u2019s own prescient comments on the matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Computation and logic, for Turing, are conceptually human activities that do not exist outside of human contexts; in the intuitive starting point he uses, a computational process can only be set in motion once we humans have first articulated a problem that it is meant to solve. Professor Floyd suggests that Turing takes this insight about computation from Wittgenstein\u2019s construal of logic as a kind of \u201clanguage-game,\u201d in which we (the participants) manipulate symbols in accordance with a step-by-step procedure. Indeed, Floyd reminds us, historically the first \u201ccomputors\u201d were human beings hired to perform such procedures. In doing so, they calculated \u201cwithout thought,\u201d according to Turing; playing the particular language-game of computation required them to act as, or to pretend to be, mere constitutive parts of a mechanical process. Turing\u2019s analogy was to a person calculating out the decimal expansion of a real number.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we look at how people today participate in activities shaped by AI, we might understand that participation as similarly mechanical. Digital \u201cnudging\u201d presents technology users with a constrained set of choices (\u201cWill you watch this advertisement, or leave this website?\u201d) and goes on to treat their choices as data points, simple steps toward drawing useful conclusions for clients. (\u201c80% of users watched your ad.\u201d) In this sense, we can understand surveillance capitalism as rendering human activity algorithmic, with any spontaneous and diverse activity useless for its purposes to be dismissed as \u201cnoise.\u201d \u201cThis \u2018noise,\u2019\u201d claims Professor Floyd, \u201creally matters to the outcomes we will see in terms of culture and society. Democracy itself requires the cacophony of different voices, each speaking his or her mind.\u201d Turing, she goes on to argue, was well aware of this potential tension, as evidenced by his claim that \u201cno democratic mathematical community\u201d ought to allow logic to be made uniform or authoritatively constrained by top-down efforts to standardize it. This would be to misunderstand it as an abstract process rather than a linguistic, social practice.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Turing Test, too, must be understood as expressing an essentially linguistic, social problem. Professor Floyd emphasizes how the Turing Test takes place within a particular social setting: one person poses questions to another person and a machine, and tries to determine which of the two is \u201cintelligent.\u201d The point of this is not to determine whether or not machines can think, nor whether or not we can\u00a0know\u00a0<\/em>whether or not machines can think; rather, the test is meant to assess whether or not the question \u201cCan a machine think?\u201d is a \u201cgrammatical\u201d question, that is, a question articulated clearly enough for us to even know what an answer would look like. We might wonder if the questioner in this scenario even understands what he is meant to be assessing. Moreover, when the test has concluded and the two humans interact face to face, if the questioner has classified the other person as a machine, what will that fact mean to both of them? In other words, as Professor Floyd puts it, \u201cHow will they go on together?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Given our entanglement with AI and other algorithms, this question is both a practical and an urgent one. Consider the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which Floyd examines in the paper from which her lecture is adapted. In this case, the use of algorithms on Facebook targeted certain groups of users with political posts and advertisements in an attempt to change the way they would vote. The company\u2019s approach presented circles of like-minded users with rhetoric that the company\u2019s algorithms predicted would elicit strong responses from them; users profiled as \u201cconscientious,\u201d for example, were shown ads against gay marriage that made reference to dictionary definitions and \u201claw and order.\u201d But by introducing such rhetoric into these targeted circles, Cambridge Analytica did more than shift votes: it encouraged users to uptake this rhetoric as speakers themselves and, further, to form echo chambers that continually reproduce this kind of speech. Turing positions us to recognize features of these cases that demand attention and clarification, including the fact that many users dropped Facebook after learning about the scandal. What can we say about ourselves, all the people involved \u2014\u00a0that they have been moved by \u201chidden persuaders,\u201d or even that they have been rendered in some sense \u201cmechanical\u201d? And, just as importantly, what can we say\u00a0to\u00a0<\/em>other people \u2014 what will be the nature of our conversations with them, and how will we go on together?<\/span><\/p>\n

More information on Professor Floyd’s work can be found at her lecture page<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are a few different ways we might understand this claim. On the one hand, there is a tremendous amount of contemporary interest in Alan Turing, with acclaimed films such as The Imitation Game\u00a0and\u00a0Ex Machina\u00a0reflecting the magnetic pull of his life and research in popular culture. On the other hand, we find ourselves in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17544,"featured_media":749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2631,2633],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17544"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=768"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":926,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/768\/revisions\/926"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/lecturesincriticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}