Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Sure, MoneyBeat Says Their Posts Are Not Written by Robots But How Can We Know?

I smell a Turing test!
From MoneyBeat:

Train Reading: This Post Was Not Produced by a Robot 
Crikey! AP will start using, gulp, robots to write news stories – Poynter
Asimov's three laws do not explicitly ban lying on the part of the robot writer.

In fact there is a body of literature arguing that by the time"The Bicentennial Man" was publish in 1984 Asimov was close to rejecting the three laws although stopping short of saying robots could do any damn thing they want.

Further, the issue may be framed as akin to the concept of Taqiyya where the robot can practice dissimulation if it feels it is under duress.

The only way to be sure is to perform the test.

Related: Gran Turismo or Why You Shouldn't Worry If Someone Runs Down the Hall Shouting "I'm a Real Boy"

See also: "The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever":
The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever is a logic puzzle invented by American philosopher and logician George Boolos and published in The Harvard Review of Philosophy in 1996. A translation in Italian was published earlier in the newspaper La Repubblica, under the title L'indovinello più difficile del mondo. The puzzle is inspired by Raymond Smullyan.
It is stated as follows:
Three gods A, B, and C are called, in no particular order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are da and ja, in some order. You do not know which word means which....
...MORE