If that's true, then why did Turing claim in his original paper that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool humans and "pass the test" 30% of the time? Why state such a specific prediction for a test that was not intended to be practical and only a "thought experiment"?

Why can't it be both? In Turing's time (and still today) there were (and are) people who think real strong human-like AI is impossible. In order to evaluate "intelligence," though, we need a standard test that we could agree on. Turing attempted to roughly define the outlines of such a test, which also involved a lot of philosophical debate. On the other hand, he predicted within 50 years of his paper that computers would be around which could pass this test, which suggests that he thought it was in fact a practical (if a little vague) way of gauging progress in AI.

Well, please re-read the original paper.

You are correct that the original test did not specify an AI expert as interrogator. On the other hand, read the types of dialogue Turing offers as examples. It's very clear that he is imagining "interrogators" (note that word -- it implies someone with a strong drive to ask probing questions) who are not only quite intelligent but also keep asking very probing questions designed to test the intellect of the person/thing on the other side.

The standard is clearly NOT, "Gee, can I have a nice small talk conversation?" Instead, the "interrogator" uses questions varying from computational problems to chess problems to questions about composing a sonnet to detailed discussion of subtle linguistic meanings in English, related in abstract ways to classic literature.

That doesn't sound like your "average Joe" interrogator to me. Does it to you? I'm sure Turing didn't expect all his interrogators to be so intelligent, but they were clearly expected (based on his sample dialogues) to understand how to probe intelligence at a pretty sophisticated level.

Indeed. Here's an excerpt from Turing's original paper that described the "imitation game," replying to a possible objection that his test would not be able to be used to gauge true understanding as a human might:

THAT is the sort of standard of AI that Turing was envisioning could be passed in his "test." It isn't a computer pretending to be a non-responsive teenager with an attitude problem who doesn't really speak the same language as the interrogator (as some chatbots might claim).

It's an idea of AI as something that could debate word replacement in a Shakespearean sonnet, would understand and be able to process poetic scansion, understand the subtle word meanings and connotations in language, and be able to synthesize these various things together while applying such concepts to evaluations of classic literary references.

Turing's test then assumes an AI competent enough to have a flawless conversation on the level of a bright university student or even a colleague of Turing's. Now, granted, we might find the literature quiz a little unnecessary, but in a more general sense this example gets at the idea of probing the AI's understanding of concepts, connecting disparate uses of things together (like a literary character to an abstract concept to a matter of style or poetic form), and in general a fluent and adaptive recognition of linguistic meaning.

I think we would all agree that the various chatbots that have claimed in recent years to have "passed the Turing test" are NOWHERE near this level.

This is the kind of standard Turing himself explicitly mentioned in his original article on the test. And frankly, if I encountered an AI that could have a conversation this fluid and wide-ranging (even if not on literature specifically) in flawless English, I'd be happy to declare it "intelligent." But we don't have anything close to that -- and pretending the "Turing test" is obsolete and needs to be more strict is misunderstanding the ridiculously high expectations Turing himself set out many decades ago.

Absolutely true. But in federal law, by default, they exist until proven otherwise (at least according to the pre-1937ish Constitution).

Actually, you do, according to FEDERAL law (again, going with the pre-1937ish Constitution). The 9th and 10th amendments say that regulation of rights not enumerated are reserved to states or to individuals. The STATES may regulate your right to drive. The federal government does not get to regulate that right.

Precisely right, since regulating driving or transportation is not an enumerated power of the federal government (pre-1937). Nowadays, and for the past 75 years or so, SCOTUS has just rolled over and let the federal government pretty much do what it wants, so the federal government is effectively no longer bound by enumerated powers. But back when it was, from the perspective of the FEDERAL government, they could not regulate your right to drive... only states or local governments.

I'm assuming you mean the 1970s. 200 years before that was the 1770s. Please cite a federal law from the 1770s that qualifies as one of your "sensible gun laws." Or, well, for it even to be relevant to thsi conversation, it must post-date the enactment of the current Constitution, so cite one after 1789, I suppose.

Feceral law has always been pretty severely restricted in terms of gun regulation. (Note, for example, SCOTUS's overruling of the Brady Bill's requirements for state and local governments to conduct background checks -- those are reegulations that get to be determined by STATES, not by the federal government, according to the 10th amendment.) STATE laws were always allowed to regulate that right, since states are by default granted regulatory powers not assigned tot he federal government.

What SCOTUS did in recent years was to INCORPORATE an explicit federal right into state and local law, a trend that it has gradually been doing with the Bill of Rights for the past 150 years or so. Before, only the federal government was bound to respect the 2nd amendment; now states and local governments must too. Just like state and local governments now must obey the 1st or 5th or whatever amendments too (which wasn't always the case -- for example, there were states in the U.S. that had official established religions).

(For the record, I think we need lots of better gun regulation. I'm fully in favor of strict training requirements etc. to own such a weapon. But that has no bearing on the legal arguments here, which you're grossly misrepresenting.)

Perhaps you might just try a basic internet search and you might find out how wrong you are.

Your "incorrect" usage was first recorded in the late 1700s and in recent decades constitutes roughly 75% of all occurrences of the word. This prescriptivist battle was likely lost more than a half-century ago. Heck, I remember Obama using the "wrong" meaning (i.e., hugeness) in his inaugural address.

I only use the word to mean a "great evil," but pretending that it only means that or that the "hugeness" thing is a recent phenomenon is just living in denial of the facts... Which happens to most people who nit-pick grammar. I long ago realized all I can do is police my own usage, and the rest of the world is likely ignorant of these distinctions... Worse, many of these distinctions never occurred in natural language anyway but were made up by some silly person in the 1800s (though not the present case of "enormity").

Please read the 9th and 10th amendments. Just because "rights" are not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution does NOT mean they aren't real or don't exist. On the contrary, the Constitution was written with the exact opposite default position: if the Constitution doesn't explicitly say the federal government is allowed to do something (including restricting or regulating your rights), it by default does not have that power. Or at least that was roughly the way case law interpreted things until somewhere around 1937-1942.

Huh?

Umm, when SCOTUS said owning slaves was Constitutional, it WAS clearly constitutional. You know, they actually added a Constitutional amendment to outlaw slavery (the 13th) about 75 years after the Constitution first came into effect. Until then, it definitely was constitutional and was explicitly part of the negotiations that went into drafting the original Constitution.

To this, I offer the following parable:

There once was a man who wanted to open a series of restaurants. He hired an architect, interior designers, and a team of construction contractors to build the first restaurant. After a year of planning and building, the restaurant was finished.

The man went on Slashdot and then did read posts by AK Marc and martin-boundary and others, who told him that "every person involved was already paid."

So the man decided not to open his restaurant. Burglars came and stole the food. Squatters came and took up residence in the building. But the man was unconcerned, since "every person involved was already paid."

At the end of the year, the man went to his accountant. Lo, his accountant was not pleased. "Why didst thou spend thy money upon this restaurant?" saith the accountant.

The man saith unto his accountant, "'Every person involved was already paid.' AK Marc and martin-boundary hath told me so. Thus I decided customers were not necessary and figured the project was finished."

But the account then pointed out that the man had not been paid. And lo, the man was sore aggrieved. Thenceforth, he built no more restaurants, and construction business dried up in town. His architect and his designers and his construction workers lost their jobs and never were paid again.

But, as the Slashdot posters had said:

But the workers were quite confused, since they lost their jobs.

Here endeth the lesson.

(P.S. In case this is too unclear to the dense posters and mods who rated such comments highly -- yes, for a particular movie project, the people who "worked" on it were already paid. But the corporations and investors who paid all of them were depending on future profits to make back their initial capital outlay. If they don't receive enough profits, they will stop funding future projects, and "the grip and such" will likely not get as much work. You may or may not think this is a bad idea -- and I'm NOT defending the current copyright system by any means -- but pretending that "every person involved was already paid" and there will be no future impact on their lives is just ridiculous.)

Let me preface this (as i always have to do here) by saying that the current copyright system is broken, the stupid copyright extensions that businesses have pushed through are ridiculous, material should go into the public domain much sooner (the original U.S. 1790 Copyright Act's idea of 14 years seemed plenty), etc.

But just because we recognize that copyright is fundamentally broken and business models may need to change does NOT mean we should mod up any completely nonsensical pro-piracy argument that anyone writes here.

And that's what this is -- a "+5 Insightful" comment that fails basic logic.

WHO PAYS THESE PEOPLE? and WHY?

Seriously. Are you (and the mods who bumped this up) so completely ignorant of basic business practices that you don't understand the concept of laying out capital with the expectation of future return?

Let's say you go to work to write some code, say, and people pay your salary. After you're done writing that code, does everyone at the business throw a giant party and say, "Huzzah! We're all paid! We don't need no stinkin' customers to buy anything! Yeah!"

No.

What happens with most business models is that at some stage someone (usually with more resources than your average worker) has to lay out money in advance and go into "debt" on a particular project. Why do they do this? Because they need to pay people who generally can't afford to sit around and wait to get paid until the project is done (i.e., most workers).

What the heck are you talking about? When exactly do the people who paid the pickers get paid?? When they sell the apples. After the apples are picked, everyone can't just declare "Huzzah! Everyone has been paid! Let's all go home!"

The people who have NOT been paid yet are the people who funded the whole enterprise in the first place. And guess what? If those people don't make a profit, they stop growing apples. They close up shop. Those pickers who were "already paid" lose their jobs.

Look, any comparison to copyright/intellectual property is already flawed. But in some ways, it works like most businesses -- somebody (usually "investors" or "the boss" or whoever) puts out money in advance with the expectation that they get a return. If they don't get a return, they stop funding businesses like that.

Say you're building a commercial building. You hire an architect, engineers, and a number of construction workers of various kinds. They all "get paid" at the end of the week or at the end of the job. Various people may outlay money in such a project in advance other than you -- the construction company owner, for example, might bid on the job. He still needs to pay his workers usually weekly or biweekly, but his construction company may not get paid until the job is complete. Then he can balance the books.

Similarly, you -- the guy who had the idea of building the building or invested in it -- put out a lot of money up front. When do you get paid? Perhaps it takes 10 years of rent payments from future tenants to get your money back. But after those 10 years, you earn a profit for the rest of the life of the building.

All of those costs are built-in. Those construction workers, etc. are all paid by someone else who is waiting for a return on his money. If he doesn't get it, he will stop funding such projects. You can't just say on the day construction is complete, "Well, gee -- the building is all built and everyone got paid! Let's all go home because we're all done! Better yet -- let's open up the building and let anyone come in and use it FOR FREE because everyone's been paid."

Seriously? THAT'S what you're arguing.

Or, more accurately, you seem to be arguing that piracy should determine how many "years rent" should be allowed to be charged to make profits. If I were building a commercial building and you told me that after 6 months the doors would be flung open, and any random person could come live there rent free -- guess what? I probably wouldn't fund a lot of buildings, or the scale of these would have to be radically changed in a manner that could make the quickest profit possible.

(Aside -- that's another issue that I won't get into in detail here. But what's often forgotten is how creative work will likely be changed if long-term investments are no longer rewarded. The only crap that still gets made is stuff that will make the quickest money possible and appeals to the people stupid enough to buy it upfront and not buy into your piracy propaganda. Granted, that's MOST commercial creative work already. But what about the "alternative" artists, the ones with new ideas that require an investor to "take a chance" and might actually bring something NEW? Maybe crowdsourcing could solve some of these cases, but the point is that SOMEONE generally has to pay something in advance, whether it's a rich dude or a bunch of customers who "believe in" the idea.)

Again, copyright is broken. I don't claim to have a complete answer to fix it. But justifying piracy on the basis that "everyone's been paid by the time I pirate something" is forgetting that for big projects that involve dozens or hundreds or thousands of people, SOMEONE had to outlay that money. And they're going to stop paying for such projects if the "spoilage" (as you term it) is so high that they don't make profits any longer. So far, the "spoilage" hasn't driven big movie companies out of business. But if everyone accepted your argument, it likely would.

Yes. But if they're like most merchants in the world (with the exception of some gas stations and a random shop here and there), they pass that cost onto YOU too, even if you don't use a credit card.

Umm, well again if it's like most merchants in the world, you and I pay the same price if I pay by credit card and you pay by cash.

The difference is that they're "robbing" 2% from me, while they rob 3% from you.

Thus, I win if I use the card in the current system.

Convince more merchants to offer cash discounts or convince so many people to stop using cards that most merchants want to charge a fee. Then we can talk about how people are stupid for using credit cards to get rewards. Until you do so, refusing to use a card is just letting the card companies take MORE money from you.

Uh, I know you're joking here, but it's ironic given that en passant was actually originally introduced to the game as part of an attempt to "streamline" chess and make it faster paced and less tedious. Pawns were allowed to advance two spaces on their first move instead of just one (which gets the game going faster), and en passant was the obvious countermove necessary to prevent those pawns from getting an undue advantage (and more likely to get to the other side where they will be promoted and delay the game more).

True. But if you read the link, it also happened during public hysteria worked up over a campaign to "name and shame" sex offenders in the past. TFA here is proposing to do this on a much grander scale. Therefore it's a pretty relevant example of the kinds of things that public hysteria over this issue can do if it's not handled well.

Short-term (less than 5 years or so)? Not a big gap. Long-term? Absolutely. Run the numbers. There may be a few markets in the U.S. where it makes sense to rent, or if you're a person who definitely plans to make big moves at least every 5 years or so. If you plan to stay in the same area for a decade or more, though, owning almost always wins out bigtime.

Well, that's because many people own "too much home," and the vast majority of people are very poor about planning appropriately for retirement expenses. I don't think this says as much about home ownership in general as about those who buy homes they can't sustain in the long-term and/or don't plan appropriately for retirement. (Sure, there are some states/areas where property taxes suddenly jump or whatever, and people can't afford to continue living where they are, but that's certainly not everywhere.)

Also, there's the not so insignificant issue of needing more space when you have kids, but not as much when you're an old couple living by yourself. That's more difficult to plan for, particularly if you have a large family -- in that case, you probably should have planned ahead to move into a smaller home when the kids move out, unless you have enough money saved to keep up the big home through old age.

Lastly, when downsizing, you most certainly have a "nest egg" if you can sell your big home and completely pay off the new home you're going to live through retirement in COMPLETELY right away (with no mortgage). That's the whole point of having a nest egg. If you were a renter and didn't save, you would still have to shell out big monthly payments for all of your retirement years... whereas even if you have to downsize, these homeowners probably don't. (Aside, of course, from regular homeowning expenses, which are not insignificant, as you point out, but they're generally nowhere near as much as rental costs once you have the mortgage paid off.)

I'd really be interested in seeing where that's true. The average break-even point for renting vs. owning is probably 5-7 years in most areas. Some areas it may be as little as 2-3 (if rents are really high), other places it may be as much as 10 years or a little more (if rents are really low, but prices are high).

Rental markets generally adjust to housing prices over time, so it's unlikely that you could have a long-term sustainable market where you'd need to take a lot more than 10 years to break even unless it was somewhere where no one EVER sells real estate. (Such things do exist, such as in old Italian cities like Rome, where it's next to impossible to buy anything, since properties have been in the same family for centuries... but it's extremely rare in the U.S.)

And even if housing prices are inflated, interest rates are still quite low now (but may start rising). Which means that you may still be able to get an interest rate that roughly tracks inflation over the long term. Effectively, that means you're not really "paying interest" but getting a "zero interest" loan on a huge sum of money for 30 years (since you get to pay later in constant payments, which will be cheaper as inflation makes the dollars worth less). Rents, on the other hand, will rise with inflation.

Take this into account, and I sincerely doubt you'll find many places where renting makes sense for much more than 10 years.