Alan Kay, Alan Turing, and your truly, October 2 in London
An event worth coming to London for
I don’t usually announce events here but this one is special:
On October 2, in celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the Turing Test, the legendary Alan Kay, one of the greatest inventors and thinkers of our time (and also a loyal supporter of this Substack) speaks at The Royal Society.
Bonus and full disclosure, I am on the agenda, too.
A few tickets have just been released to the public, details here.
Gary Marcus is truly excited for this one.
The Royal Society publishes presentation on their YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@royalsociety) so hopefully we'll see this one appear there sooner or later.
My pet peeve when it comes to the Turing Test are all the useless claims that modern LLMs pass it. I would love to see that addressed at the meeting. IMHO, what we need is a new formulation of the Turing Test where the inner workings of the AI matter. Of course, this would contradict Turing's idea that if the human questioner can't tell the difference between AI and human, then there is no difference and the AI passes the test. This didn't anticipate LLM "cheating" so we need to add some qualifications that both the AI and the human questioner must pass in order for the test to be valid.
Ooh congrats, Gary!