You and I are constantly having original thoughts while walking and chewing gum at the same time, thing is they not impressive enough to be called "original". The test in TFA just extends the psychologically comforting idea that intelligence is something unique to higher life forms, yet when I was at school in the 60's intelligence was generally considered to be unique to humans, animals were generally considered to be instinctual automata, which likely explains why Turing defined AI as the ability to hold a human conversation.

I think Watson would be able to give it's real age by finding the information rather than recalling it, although it might get confused by progressive versions. AI can also produce a picture of a generic rabbit, or cat as the case may be.

The thing that Watson (and AI in general) has difficulty with is imagination, it has no experience of the real world so if you asked it something like what would happen if you ran down the street with a bucket of water, it would be stuck. Humans who have never run with a bucket of water will automatically visualise the situation and give the right answer, just as everyone who read the question have just done so in their mind. OTOH a graphics engine can easily show you what would happen to the bucket of water because it does have a limited knowledge of the physical world.

This is the problem with putting AI in a box labeled "Turing test", it (arrogantly) assumes that human conversation is the only definition of intelligence. I'm pretty sure Turing himself would vigorously dispute that assumption if he were alive today.

By definition, one in three means it failed to convince the average layman, when it gets better that one in two I will give it a pass.

Personally I think it's achievable today but as much as I admire Turing it's entirely irrelevant to the question of intelligence. It's mostly philosophical masterbation by people who misunderstand the modern definition of intelligent behaviour. For example I can't get a sensible reply when asking an octopus about it's garden but there is no denying it's a remarkably intelligent creature.

Powershell is object-oriented, and unlike bash scripting, its command names have some semblance of order and discoverability. No, man is not comparable to "get-help"

I heard a great anecdote about this from an MIT proffessor on youtube. Back in the 80's the professor developed an AI program that could translate equations into the handful of standard forms required by calculus and solve them. A student heard about this and went calling to see the program in action. The professor spent an hour explaining the algorithm, when the student finally understood he exclaimed, "That's not intelligent, it's doing calculus the same way I do".

It could be argued that neither the student nor the computer were intelligent since they were simply following rules, but if that's the case the only those handful of mathematicians who discovered the standard form are intelligent. It should also be noted that since that time computers routinely discover previously unknown mathematical truths by brute force extrapolation of the basic axioms of mathematics, however none of them have been particularly useful for humans.

When people dispute the existence of AI what they are really disputing is the existence of artificial consciousness, we simply don't know if a computer operating a complex algorithm is conscious and quite frankly it's irrelevant to the question of intelligence. For example most people who have studied ants agree an ants nest displays highly intelligent behaviour, they have evolved a more efficient and generally better optimised solution to the travelling salesman problem than human mathematics (or intuition) can provide, yet few (if any) people would argue that an ant or it's nest is a conscious being.

Just because someone sets some random people up for a five minute interview with a chatbot doesn't mean they're running a Turing Test.

Give people enough time to conduct a proper conversation, hell give them time to ask the chatbot for some original content. Do that and you'll be running a real Turing Test.

The reason you keep hearing about these simplified Turing Tests is those are the only tests people run because those are the only tests computers can pass. But passing a true Turing Test is still a great standard for detecting real AI, and something no one can even approach doing yet.

Precisely! The cow fart thing has been deliberately overblown by vested interests (ie: evil environmentalists want to take away your hamburger!!!!). The fact of the matter is that today's cow fart is tomorrow's cow food. Of course if we could stop cows farting and burping we could reduce our overall impact on climate but the real climate related problem not just with with cows but with agriculture in general is land use, ie: flattening forests and scrub land, draining wetlands, etc, to make way for pasture, shrimp farms, etc.

At the end of the day there aren't too many cows or pigs on the planet, there are too many people. However according to said vested interests uttering the simple fact that overpopulation is the root cause of the current environmental collapse somehow means that I want to start exterminating humans en-mass? - Not at all, I just happen to be concerned that collectively we appear to be behaving with all the forethought of a jar of fermenting yeast and as a consequence my three grand kids may suffer the same fate if we fail to reverse that trend.

Jaws was a great movie, however it was just a fucking movie.

Mosquitoes kill around one million people a year worldwide.
Domestic dogs kill over 3000 people a year worldwide (over 50,000 if you count rabies).
A kick to the head by a cow or horse kills about 40 people a year in the US alone.
ALL species of sharks combined have killed an average of 4.2 people a year worldwide over the last decade.

Too bad you feed your brain with fear rather than facts.

Sure, Eisenhower warned of the problems but lets try something radical like reading the entire speech. Here's some context to whet your appetite...

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction....[snip]...But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions....[snip]....In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

In other words, Eisenhower saw the overwhelming power of the MIC as essential for peace and at the same time was warning the nation about the potential of a home grown Hitler.

I'm sorry, I just read through that paper, and nowhere in it does it say that a decline in Antarctic ice is a forecast of AGW. That's one of the worst examples of "proof by ghost reference" I've ever seen. Not to mention that the paper is mainly focused on the Antarctic Peninsula, the one place that actually gets melt on more than super-rare occasions and juts into a different climate zone.

You are missing the point, people won't burst into flames because of AGW. However the Arab spring was preceded by the worst drought in the the history of the fertile crescent (the birthplace of agriculture). People didn't suddenly log on to facebook and find out they were living under tyrants. There were food riots in Cairo and other major cities BEFORE the uprisings, almost 10% of Syria's total population just walked away from their farms and went looking for work in the cities.

Go and find out why that one guy set himself on fire in the public square, and why it resonated across the Arab world. Don't believe the "hunger for freedom" bullshit, these people were hungry for bread.

Not according to HR.

It seems you can be compelled to reveal your passwords in the US if they're looking for evidence they already know to exist rather than information they may not know about.

I don't agree with her suing Tor but I disagree that this is necessarily an instance of the Streisand Effect.

Not taking action would be succumbing to a form of the heckler's veto. I suspect in a lot of cases they start out trying to get rid of the info and most stop when it becomes obvious they'll only make it more public. But in a case like this she might be willing to face the publicity because she thinks seeking justice is more important than giving up.

Go right ahead and point me to where a decline in Antarctic ice was a forecast of AGW.

You do know that - below freezing - there's an inverse correlation between temperature and snowfall, don't you? And I really hope you know that it's very rare that temperatures rise above freezing in the vast majority of Antarctica, whether you add a couple degrees to the temperature or not, right? Or did you not know / ever consider that?

Just because you didn't realize something that should have been really bloody obvious to you doesn't mean it was a scientific prediction by your straw-man scientists.