Yorick Wilks on inflated artificial intelligence claims
"Hype really does exist in science; the answer must be the right combination of patience, cynicism and stamina."
- Yorick Wilks, writing in The Guardian
There has been a lot of media comment about the recent claim that a computer program called Eugene Goostman has, for the first time ever, passed the so-called Turing Test - in other worlds, fooled a critical mass of humans into thinking that it was itself human. Wilks, a professor emeritus of artificial intelligence at Sheffield University and a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition, is not convinced. After reviewing the evidence from a historical perspective, he observes that science is not immune to the all-too-human flaw of hype. As scientists are also human, we at LabLit.com are not too surprised!