AI Quotes

“(Hofstadter adds that a dearly loved person can still exist after bodily death. The self of the "lost" person, previously fully instantiated in their brain, is now instantiated at a less fine-grained level in the brains of the loving survivor/s. He insists that this isn't merely a matter of "living on" in someone's memory, or of the survivor's having adopted some of the other's characteristics, e.g. a passion for opera. Rather, the two pre-death selves had interpenetrated each other's mental lives and personal ideals so deeply that each can literally live on in the other. Through her widower, a dead mother can even consciously experience her children's growing up. This counter-intuitive claim posits something similar to personal immortality—although when all the survivors themselves have died, the lost self is no longer instantiated. Lasting personal immortality, in computers, is foreseen by the "transhumanist" philosophers: see Chapter 7.)”
― Margaret A. Boden, AI: Its Nature and Future

“In a paper published in the philosophy journal Mind, Alan Turing described what's called the Turing Test. This asks whether someone could distinguish, 30% of the time, whether they were interacting (for up to five minutes) with a computer or a person. If not, he implied, there'd be no reason to deny that a computer could really think.

That was tongue in cheek. Although it featured in the opening pages, the Turing Test was an adjunct within a paper primarily intended as a manifesto for a future Al. Indeed, Turing described it to his friend Robin Gandy as light-hearted "propaganda," inviting giggles rather than serious critique.”
― Margaret A. Boden, AI: Its Nature and Future