[Newspoetry] Swapping lies to test Intellects?

[DL Emerick]

Swapping lies to test Intellects?

 

Professor Popper popped his quiz;

It wasn't popcorn nor champagne.

He asked his students to explain

What conjectural refutation is.

 

Upon solid desks, answers scrolled

Across many glowing pixel screens,

Where PCs barfed, in vomit bold,

Answers computed, counting means.

 

High priests of higher tech scored

Answers according to their charts,

Chanting out the judgments, bored,

When sounds intelligible the parts.

 

For this was a test of intellect IQ,

To give an answer already known,

Cognized by previous mind as true --

What, as a standard, could be flown?

 

If man against machine is displayed,

Then dummy the standards down now:

Humming machine makes human grade

When humans, fooled and dizzy, bow.

 

"Deus ex machine speaks as one of us"

Surely, we have heard enough of him

Even if not face to face, make no fuss,

To say he is but human, not alien them.

 

A machine more intelligent than man

We could not recognize as so smart,

But one that fools us is a good plan,

Great strategy for our creating art.

 

Intelligence is no matter of fools

Who gaily admit they were conned,

Celebrating the ironical old rules,

Death's promise, stock and bond.

 

Rabbinic priests rose up and sighed:

Man's not made for answers certain,

He's always saying old gods have died,

But never yet rung down the curtain.

 

A man is a man when he has a doubt,

When he finds a question to explore,

And yet never is, when he finds it out,

Happy with conjecture from a Store.

 

He wants his conjecture's refutation,

Of chance yet whispering in his ear

Leaving him choice in his abnegation,

Of lies for swapping his gods to fear.

 

 

Ok, so all this is forced, bad verse, hardly intelligible.  I was arranging -
obviously badly - to talk about the AI guys, the ones who proclaim the current
high standard of machine intelligence.  Namely, they say: "When a human can't
tell the difference between what a machine says, in answer to a question, and
what humans might say, even differently and variably, then that machine has
human intelligence."

 

The problems with this standard start from a human point of view, and ignore all
issues of what a machine might consider to be the proper standard for
intelligence.  "If I were a machine, I would not be happy with such a
dummied-down standard."  It's so simple, so very simple, that even a human can
meet it!  The standard assumes the goal of intelligence is to fool the humans.
However, priests have been doing that for thousands of years, even though every
intelligent being thoroughly knows that being a fool is hardly any proper sign
of intelligence.

 

Now, intelligence depends upon having some questions that are personal, in some
sense, as primary reasons for being alive.  You could, perhaps, call this the
motivation of man to be intelligent - for otherwise, man is just a fool, and
quite happy to be a fool, grinning like an idiot, like George Bush, perhaps.

 

Imagine his standard for conducting the war: avoid admitting defeat, show
courage and resolution, continue fighting on until the "enemy" quits fighting
first - that is what victory is, laying down your arms last.  Now, the sad truth
is, we will never lay down our arms, not in victory and never in defeat - at
least not for very long.  Now, any idiot can see that is a standard for
perpetual war, when everyone practices it - here at home as well as abroad.  It
is not a universal standard, you see, by which any peace could ever be found.

 

Intelligence is like that, universal as to the truth that it would announce, or
the sentence that it would pronounce.  And, when we examine man, to see what
truth is universal to him, all of him, and maybe only to him, there is only this
characteristic of the species, that he believes in some God who has all the
answers.

 

An intelligent man knows that answer is a dummy's answer, to believe in such
things as answers, rather than to have faith in the questions themselves, as
temporary guides towards truth, useless after any question has been uprooted, or
swapped out, for a better set of questions.

 

Intelligence is like the aspect of a hopeful man on crutches, knowing and
accepting the fact that he is lame (or lame brained), but ever willing to toss
his present crutches away, when better crutches can be found.

 

The AI standard thus needs revised: a machine would have human intelligence when
it can ask a better question, not give the same old kinds of answers that we, in
essence, already know to be our crutches.

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