I've recently developed the suspicion that the Turing test (comparing AI with a standard human) could get passed by a narrow AI finely tuned to that task.
This implies that there must be some way to distinguish a human mind from the AI, besides the the Turing Test. That is, there must be some hidden property that fulfills the following criteria:
So, a). what is this property whose existence you are proposing, and b). how would we test for its presence and absence ?
The most popular answers are "consciousness" and "I don't know", but I find these unsatisfactory. Firstly, no one seems to have a definition of "consciousness" that isn't circular (i.e., "you know, it's that thing that humans have but AIs don't") or a priori unfalsifiable ("it's your immortal soul !"). Secondly, if you can't test for the presence or absence of a thing, then you might as well ignore it, since, as far as you know, it doesn't actually do anything.
The slightly less popular answers to (b) are all along the lines of, "let's make the agent perform some specific creative task that some humans are good at, such as composing a poem, painting a picture, dancing a tango, etc.". Unfortunately, such tests would produce too many false negatives. I personally cannot do any of the things I listed above, and yet I'm pretty sure I'm human. Or am I ? How would you know ?
This implies that there must be some way to distinguish a human mind from the AI, besides the the Turing Test.
Maybe the AI lacks the ability to learn any skills in a non-linguistic way - it could never recognise videos, merely linguistic descriptions of this. Maybe it's incapable of managing actual humans (though it can spout some half-decent management theory if pressed linguistically).
I'd say a general AI should be tested using some test that it wasn't optimised for/trained on.
Thinking aloud:
Humans are examples of general intelligence - the only example we're sure of. Some humans have various degrees of autism (low level versions are quite common in the circles I've moved in), impairing their social skills. Mild autists nevertheless remain general intelligences, capable of demonstrating strong cross domain optimisation. Psychology is full of other examples of mental pathologies that impair certain skills, but nevertheless leave their sufferers as full fledged general intelligences. This general intelligence is not enough, however, to solve their impairments.
Watson triumphed on Jeopardy. AI scientists in previous decades would have concluded that to do so, a general intelligence would have been needed. But that was not the case at all - Watson is blatantly not a general intelligence. Big data and clever algorithms were all that were needed. Computers are demonstrating more and more skills, besting humans in more and more domains - but still no sign of general intelligence. I've recently developed the suspicion that the Turing test (comparing AI with a standard human) could get passed by a narrow AI finely tuned to that task.
The general thread is that the link between narrow skills and general intelligence may not be as clear as we sometimes think. It may be that narrow skills are sufficiently diverse and unique that a mid-level general intelligence may not be able to develop them to a large extent. Or, put another way, an above-human social intelligence may not be able to control a robot body or do decent image recognition. A super-intelligence likely could: ultimately, general intelligence includes the specific skills. But his "ultimately" may take a long time to come.
So the questions I'm wondering about are: