To strengthen DanielLC’s point, say we have a software program capable of beating the Turing test. In room A, it runs on a standard home desktop, and it is pitted against a whole-brain-emulation using several supercomputer clusters consuming on the order of ten megawatts.
In room B, the software program is run on a custom-built piece of hardware—a standard home desktop’s components interlinked with a large collection of heating elements, heatsinks attached to these heating elements, and cooling solutions for the enormous amount of heat generated, consuming on the order of ten megawatts. It is pitted against the person whom the whole-brain-emulation copy was made from—a whole-brain-emulation running on one whole brain.
It makes no sense that in room A the software wins and in room B the brain wins.
I agree that if it’s just hooked up to heat producing elements that play absolutely no role in the computation, then that waste heat or extra power consumption is irrelevant. But that’s not the case with any computer I’ve ever heard of and certainly not with Watson. The waste heat is directly related to its compute capability.
See the papers linked in my other comment for much more rigorous dismantling of the idea that resource efficiency doesn’t matter for a Turing test.
Also, the big fundamental flaw here is when you say:
say we have a software program capable of beating the Turing test.
You’re acting like this is a function of the software with no concern for the hardware. A massive, inefficient, exponentially slow (software-wise) look-up table can beat the Turing test if you either (a) give it magically fast hardware or (b) give it extra time to finish. But this clearly doesn’t capture the “spirit” of what you want. You want software that is somehow innately efficient in the manner it solves the problem. This is why most people would say a brute force look-up table is not intelligent, but a human is. Presumably the brain does something more resource efficient to generate responses the way that it does. But all 5 minute conversations, for example, can be bounded in terms of total number of bits transmitted, and you make a giant, unwieldy (but still finite) look-up table for every possible 5 minute conversation that could ever happen, and just make something win the “have a 5 minute conversation” Turing test by doing a horrible search in that table.
When you say “make some software that beats a Turing test” this is == “make some software that does a task in a resource efficient manner”, as the Shieber and Aaronson papers point out. This is why Searle’s Chinese room argument utterly falls apart: computational complexity says you could never have large enough resources to actually build Searle’s Chinese room, nor the book for looking up Chinese characters. It’s the same with the “software” you mention. You might as well call it “magic software.”
To strengthen DanielLC’s point, say we have a software program capable of beating the Turing test. In room A, it runs on a standard home desktop, and it is pitted against a whole-brain-emulation using several supercomputer clusters consuming on the order of ten megawatts.
In room B, the software program is run on a custom-built piece of hardware—a standard home desktop’s components interlinked with a large collection of heating elements, heatsinks attached to these heating elements, and cooling solutions for the enormous amount of heat generated, consuming on the order of ten megawatts. It is pitted against the person whom the whole-brain-emulation copy was made from—a whole-brain-emulation running on one whole brain.
It makes no sense that in room A the software wins and in room B the brain wins.
I agree that if it’s just hooked up to heat producing elements that play absolutely no role in the computation, then that waste heat or extra power consumption is irrelevant. But that’s not the case with any computer I’ve ever heard of and certainly not with Watson. The waste heat is directly related to its compute capability.
See the papers linked in my other comment for much more rigorous dismantling of the idea that resource efficiency doesn’t matter for a Turing test.
Also, the big fundamental flaw here is when you say:
You’re acting like this is a function of the software with no concern for the hardware. A massive, inefficient, exponentially slow (software-wise) look-up table can beat the Turing test if you either (a) give it magically fast hardware or (b) give it extra time to finish. But this clearly doesn’t capture the “spirit” of what you want. You want software that is somehow innately efficient in the manner it solves the problem. This is why most people would say a brute force look-up table is not intelligent, but a human is. Presumably the brain does something more resource efficient to generate responses the way that it does. But all 5 minute conversations, for example, can be bounded in terms of total number of bits transmitted, and you make a giant, unwieldy (but still finite) look-up table for every possible 5 minute conversation that could ever happen, and just make something win the “have a 5 minute conversation” Turing test by doing a horrible search in that table.
When you say “make some software that beats a Turing test” this is == “make some software that does a task in a resource efficient manner”, as the Shieber and Aaronson papers point out. This is why Searle’s Chinese room argument utterly falls apart: computational complexity says you could never have large enough resources to actually build Searle’s Chinese room, nor the book for looking up Chinese characters. It’s the same with the “software” you mention. You might as well call it “magic software.”