In Turning’s passage, I believe the contradictory statement; “The Argument for consciousness” by Professor Jefferson Lister Oration, to Turnings theory helps us understand online identity. This passage says that a machine cannot equal brains until it can compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions, or when it could feel pleasure, success or grief.
I believe this is applicable to online identity. When I compose an online character, on second life, as an example, I am emotionally invested in this “person.” I may be, but the actual character is not. When, she gets yelled at by other avatars, or in trouble for trying to steal a car, she is not upset or angry. The avatar does not know, what the information boxes mean when they pop-up on the screen. If my dog were to die in second life the avatar, would be “sad,” but they would still be hungry and go to work. If this were to happen in real life I would lose my appetite and probably be to upset to go to work. Emotion is one of the main differences between humans and online identities.
The second passage I chose was Lady Lovelace’s objection to Turning’s Theory. She spoke about computers ability to only know what we tell them to know. The passage further goes on to explain that in the future we will program computers to “think for themselves,” but they will still only know what we have programmed them to know.
I believe this passage summarizes online identity as well. My example for this one is smartchild or other bots that are accessible via the internet. Smart Child can tell you anything you want to know about movies, time’s table or other tangible information. But, if I ask it for advice about my boyfriend or what I should eat for dinner, it will ask me to rephrase and resubmit my question. This just strengthens Lady Lovelace’s idea that computers only know what we have programmed them to know.
Overall, Turning believes that eventually computers will be intelligent and will be able to mock a human completely. I think Turning would take second life and social games as a step into training computers to be human. The games are programmed to simulate a world that has been create within the computer, however real world entities are slowly making their way into second lives. Using Turing’s ideals computer and humans becoming one in the same would is getting close through these media’s.
1 comment:
Jennifer: In the first example, you're arguing that however much we invest ourselves in online identities, those identities can never feel or think, only we can do this. Now, this may be so, but you really need to engage with Turing's argument - i.e. your summarizing an argument ("The argument for consciousness") that Turing as arguing against and you need to be aware of that and able to discuss - at the least - Turing's position and why you differ from it. Furthermore, Professor Jefferson Lister's argument doesn't really say what you say - i.e. his point is not emotion but the production of "great art" like sonnets. The same applies to Lady Lovelace's objection. Again, these are objections Turing is summarizing and dismissing. With Lady Lovelace's view, well of course a computer only does what we program it to do, but are our online identities subject to the same criticism? The point is not so much whether the computer can think for itself but to what degree can my interactions with someone over the internet be considered real interactions or not...
In your last paragraph you seem to be suggesting that Turing is onto something with his belief that computer capacity will approach that of humans. Again, if this is the case, you might rethink how you respond to the two objections.
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