My money would be on a “smart” machine that could do work which requires rudimentary intelligence… its “level of consciousness” is of lesser importance.
:-S

If a machine had intelligence per se, this could be proved and tested. If a machine was conscious, this couldn’t be proved. But we need conscious machines like we need a hole in the head.

Scratch that: PEOPLE need consciousness like they need a…

In some written sense, that’s obviously true, but I thought that once you parsed into syllables, English and Chinese were both pretty far on the RISC side.

I bet that in 50 years, the idea that computers can “think” will be completely obvious to anyone, and only people who read up on the history of philosophy will wonder why anyone bothered to argue that they could (since they probably won’t even see the arguments about why they couldn’t)

I like that!

In the case of the Pentium chip, there really is such a “small being inside” — one that speaks only RISC opcodes, not x86 ones. (That’s something from my architecture class that I haven’t yet managed to forget.)

(And actually, I guess it’s the reverse of your thought experiment, since English is a RISC language compared to Chinese.)

Boaz

The experiment can be seen as telling us that any device for which we have the “program”/”rule book” for, regardless of whether it is human or machine, will no longer be considered as an individual.

Boaz

Thanks, man. And relax: I know my personal intuition have no place on TCS world, that’s why I’m trying to understand thing correctly, reading books and asking questions here.

that is kind of ironic cause J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, was probably a homosexual. He left his life insurance policy to his second in command at the bureau who had also been a close friend for many years. Allegedly, Hoover kept his grip on his job for 50 years because he had so much dirt on everybody in his files that no one dared touch him.

In the McCarthy perspecitve, homosexuals were indistinguishable from communists, and they were equally persecuted:

http://members.aol.com/matrixwerx/glbthistory/mccarthyism.htm
(I couldn’t find a more scholarly reference, but this is well documented stuff. The famous play “Angels in America” touches on some aspects on that period.)

Apart from the early 1950s hysteria, homosexuals were routinely fired from sensitive government jobs in the US, under the theory that they were vulnerable to blackmail. (Same in UK, and Turing lost his security clearence after his trial.)

The irony in this is that the people who were discovered to be homosexuals, and who therefore were no more exposed to blackmail, would be fired, while those who were successfully hiding (and so exposed to blackmail) could keep their job.

By the way, according to what I remember from Hodges’ biography, what got Turing really in trouble is that he was hanging out with a 19 years old, while the age of consent was 21, and that his naivety was in part to blame. After there was a burglary in his apartment, he called the police, and they asked him if he had any leads for them. He said maybe a friend of his who had been to the apartment might have given information to other people who actually broke into the apartment. Then the police asked, how come you let someone whom you suspect to associate with criminals into your apartment. And Turing told them they were dating. So the police forgot about the burglary and hauled Turing away. (That’s pretty much how Hodges tells the story.)