Week 7 Questions

1.Write one paragraph describing the Turing Test and another paragraph describing an argument against the Turing Test, known as the Chinese room.

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen.

It was described by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in which Turing considers the question "can machines think?" Since "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chose to "replace the question by another which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words." Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the Turing test”. This question, Turing believed, is one that can actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against all the major objections to this proposition. In the years since 1950, the test has proven to be both highly influential and widely criticized, and it is an essential concept in the philosophy of artificial intelligence (Wikipedia, 2009).

The Chinese Room argument, devised by John Searle, is an argument against the possibility of true artificial intelligence. The argument centers on a thought experiment in which someone who knows only English sits alone in a room following English instructions for manipulating strings of Chinese characters, such that to those outside the room it appears as if someone in the room understands Chinese. The argument is intended to show that while suitably programmed computers may appear to converse in natural language, they are not capable of understanding language, even in principle. Searle argues that the thought experiment underscores the fact that computers merely use syntactic rules to manipulate symbol strings, but have no understanding of meaning or semantics. Searle's argument is a direct challenge to proponents of Artificial Intelligence, and the argument also has broad implications for functionalist and computational theories of meaning and of mind. As a result, there have been many critical replies to the argument. The many issues raised by the Chinese Room argument will not be settled until there is a consensus about the nature of meaning, its relation to syntax, and about the nature of consciousness. There continues to be significant disagreement about what processes create meaning, understanding, and consciousness, and what can be proven a priori by thought experiments (David, C, 2004).

2. Can virtual agents succeed in delivering high-quality customer service over the Web? Think of examples which support or disprove the question or just offer an opinion based on your personal experience.

I think that virtual agents can deliver high quality customer service over the Web. For example, when I purchased a lomo cream online. I content the seller on MSN; because that was the first time I have used a lomo I asked a lot of question till late in the night. The buyer answered with great patient. This was very high quality service. Buyers can content sellers convenient all the time through the Internet. As a result, we can draw a conclusion that virtual agents succeed in delivering high-quality customer service over the Web.