Scary Machinery: Retiring Turing

Within an hour of first reading Turing’s famous 1951 article, I had conceived a machine capable not only of passing but of surpassing Turing’s imitation game. My machine surpasses Turing’s hypothetical machine because it allows me to remove the veil of secrecy between the judge and the machine. My machine surpasses Turing’s hypothetical machine because it would fool all human judges all of the time. The machine? It is a scarecrow with a fan behind it blowing its right arm back and forth.* From a sufficient distance any human observer would instantly judge that scarecrow to be intelligent.

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* A more macabre instantiation of this machine might use a cadaver, positioned standing erect with its right hand raised, moved back and forth by an electric motor. Playback of a recorded human voice might be included in order to prolong the subterfuge.

A Very Google Christmas

Suppose Google were to compile a list of its most valued customers—say all those who made Google their default search engine, Chrome their default browser, Google Earth their default mapping engine, G-mail their default mail server, Google Health their medical records organizer, Picassa their default photo editor, Blogger their default blog, and Youtube their default video outlet.

Now suppose Google were to institute a policy of sending a holiday gift to its all of its valued customers, the value of the gifts were proportional to the value of the data collected from these applications use over the course of a year. Suppose the gift chosen by Google was based on a tally of that data, processed through a series of hierarchical algorithms in order to determine what their valued customers most desired (or needed).

For how many of these valued customers would Google’s gift become the one to which they most looked forward to opening?

Supernatural or Extraterrestrial

Given the current estimate that there are 10²² solar systems in the known universe (give several orders of magnitude), and given the expansive definition of "life" and "intelligence" of present-day biology, given Susan Blackmore's perfections on Drake's Formula, applying the anthropic principle to non-earth-life as we do to earth-life, and acknowledging the apparent possibilities of future technology--many of the brightest big-picture thinkers of our day consider it a virtual statistical certainty that we are not alone in the universe.

Given the widespread ancient belief that the heavens are the domain of the gods, what are the possibilities that the angels/demons, gods/devils of religious mythology are based on historic alien visitations in humankind's past? These extraterrestrials would, of course, have been natural beings; but would have appeared supernatural to our human ancestors; their langauges, like ours, incapable of expressing unfamiliar phenomena except in terms of the familiar, by metaphorics, the likes of which are preserved in the god-traditions which survive to this day. An alien species capable of interstellar travel would have appeared omniscient, omnipotent, immortal, irresistible, inscrutable, capricious... perhaps even benevolent.

Be advised: in many of the accounts, the gods promised to return.