Episode 72: Tweenie Turing Tests, AI, and Ex Machina (with Joshua Weisberg)

People think they believe what they choose to believe.

We don't.

We mostly believe what we need to believe.

You, the greatest has spoken. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. Who are you? Who are you? A very bad man.

I'm a very good man.

Good man. They think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. Pay no attention to that man. Anybody can have a brain. You're a very bad man.

I'm a very good man. Just a very bad wizard. Welcome to very bad wizards. I'm Tamela Summers from the University of Houston. Dave, what would an AI have to do to convince you that it was intelligent?

I think that paradoxically, it would have to be capable of asking the really stupid questions that I get sometimes from my students. We can have no problem having computers ask really relevant, sharp, poignant, sensical questions. But the level of stupidity, that's what I think AI is all about. It's a specific kind of stupidity, not really about intelligence.

Although when we get to the second segment, we start talking about chat bots. They can be pretty stupid.

They're stupid, but I think they're stupid in a very computational way, and that's what makes it they're not really even like the chatting of a twelve year old girl on Instant Messenger betrays a certain kind of humanness.

So you chat with twelve year old girls on Instant Messenger? Is that what you no.

I pretend to be you know, how to Catch a Predator. They have to have someone pretending to be I've studied. I'm like the Turing test for twelve year old girls. Like if Pedophiles can be convinced you.

Work for the FBI because you perfectly.

Mimicked the Tweenie turtle.

So today we have with us Josh Weisberg to discuss AI, to tell us what it's all about, to explain what philosophers have to say about it, which the world is waiting for with bated breath on this issue. Maybe they are josh Weisberg, he is a philosopher of mind. He is chasing that holy grail of trying to once and for all put to rest the zombie argument. He was also the original co host of this show in yet to be released episodes. When it was going to all be movies. It was just going to be top lists of movies every single time. We recorded a couple of those episodes, but they never came to.

I'm very proud to be your silver medal.

That'll be in the box set special release, the bootleg series that contains all.

The fucked up audio that we almost had today.

We're all going to be in very bad moods today because we had a lot of audio problems coming into this, but we've got it worked out sort of I'm a little too close. I think you had this with Josh Snowb at one point where you were kind of snuggling up with him.

We're cuddling here.

That's right.

It's very sweet. It's kind of twelve year old girl.

Anyway, you're Josh, I think, had taken a shower.

I don't know.

That's true.

So welcome to the podcast, Josh.

Thank you very much. Yeah.

Welcome, Josh. Thanks for being on.

We should talk about we had some fun last podcast.

It was a fodder for our rant an article that appeared in Eon magazine.

No, it wasn't Eon. It was Vox.

Vox. Yeah, sorry. On the sort of failures of the movie Inside Out to properly describe the machinations of the brain. So we went for like 15 minutes.

We were like I mean yeah. And this wasn't a takedown or a reply.

An Eddie Namiya style takedown.

Yeah. It was just sort of making fun of a certain premise that the article seemed to rely on, which was that the movie should somehow be expected to give an accurate representation of how the mind works and how emotions work and all of that. Yeah. And we got I don't know, pretty soon after we released that episode, we got a couple of emails from the authors that how would you describe them? Respectfully disagreed with our yeah, the first.

Thing I want to say is it was pretty awesome to hear from them, and I think they were actually good sports. And they emailed us. They didn't chew us out. They did defend themselves. And so we wanted to give them some time to actually explain their definition. I think we still disagree, but so Jackson Kearneyon and Antonia Peacock are the two students, and they emailed us separately.

Yeah. So here's what Jackson said. It was very short that he said, I just listened to your discussion of the article and wanted to send a quick note. I worried that you guys didn't really get the point. It's less did you know that emotions aren't actually little characters running around in your head? And more that fun movie depicts the mind. Let's use that as an excuse to talk about some cool research. We tried to make that clear in the article, but maybe not clear enough. Yeah, I mean, I don't think, frankly, that came across that clearly because of some of the language and the rhetoric in the article, which we read, and you can go back and check for yourself, but that is what I initially thought the article was.

Right. I was just going to say that's a fair motivation to write a movie comes out about a particular topic. We're doing it all the time. We use movies as a starting off point to talk about philosophy or psychology, so that alone is fine. But I agree with you that the premise didn't seem to be quite that no.

And I think probably the editors didn't help them out with these big vox things that know, fun movie, bad metaphysics, right? But I think some of their language when they talk about is misleading, to say the very least. Although Antonia, the other author, had something to say about, you know, that makes it sound like you're not just using it as a launching pad to discuss cool research, you're actually criticizing it for not accurately representing certain aspects of the brain. Again, listeners can decide for themselves on that issue. One thing that's sort of interesting is that Antonia, in her email, doesn't seem to take that tack. She seems to defend the idea of criticizing the movie for not accurately representing how the mind works. So we should read a couple of her things. One thing that Jackson did say was that the editor did mess with that line that we read out about the James Lang thing.

Well, you know, I gotta say, if that was the editor, then thank you, editor, because I haven't had a belly laugh like that. Usually my laughs at your jokes are really fake and disingenuous, but that was a belly laugh.

Yeah, I think a lot of laughs at my jokes are like so this is what Antonia said. She said, don't you think that fictional movies and books and so on portray how things actually are in a particular way? And aren't there, therefore ways to criticize their inaccuracies in some instances, especially when those inaccuracies are relevant to their appeal? And then she gives the example of Pocahontas giving a sort of whitewashing of history, and I think in that case, criticizing it on that point might be legitimate. I mean, I haven't seen Pocahontas that type of thing. I would say absolutely, but that doesn't seem to be, in my view, a fair analogy. And just let me just read the next excerpt. She says, so if you grant that point, then what's left is to ask in this context is whether the criticisms levied in this particular article were apt or in apt. I myself think that the movie presented itself as a legitimate, more or less accurate, though simplified portrayal of the mind. The movie wouldn't have had the genuine appeal it did have if it didn't purport to show you the actual inner workings of something we're all curious about. So that's where I think, if I had to say the crux of the disagreement is I think that's right there, I don't think it presented itself that way. I think it would be absurd for it to present itself that way. And I don't think that's any part of its.

Know. I think that there is an interesting question, and Antonia, apparently, is she works on the philosophy of fiction, so I trust that she knows a lot more honestly than I do about it. But I take it that the reason that the Pocahontas example isn't really quite the right example to use is that Pocahontas does purport to be factual in some really important way. I mean, they named it Pocahontas. It's named after somebody that's true and historical, and presumably the account that it tells is the story of Pocahontas. I think that in this case, even though it's an interesting question, I mean, I think fiction, as I was saying to you, sort of offline, I think that a lot of fictional worlds, what they do