Week Seven Exercises

Digital Automata

Question One

Cybertwin could possibly used to answer basic questions, as in most good webpages “FAQ” sections. However, it seems pretty hard to accept that a Cybertwin could stand alone to answer all questions that may be asked of it. Also, it is not exactly practical to train a Cybertwin or Machine to answer your course questions, as you would have to program it to give the right answers, and this would be more time-consuming than actually doing the course work yourself. For basic menial tasks or questions, it could become quite a useful tool, as far as not having to use more valuable human time with these lesser tasks.


Question Two

The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
The Chinese Room argument comprises a thought experiment and associated arguments by John Searle (1980), which attempts to show that a symbol-processing machine like a computer can never be properly described as having a "mind" or "understanding", regardless of how intelligently it may behave.Searle argues that without "understanding" (what philosophers call "intentionality"), we cannot describe what the machine is doing as "thinking". Because it does not think, it does not have a "mind" in anything like the normal sense of the word, according to Searle. Therefore, he concludes, "strong AI" is mistaken.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Room


Question Three

As I mentioned earlier Virtual Agents can be utilized for customer service over the Web, in a “FAQ” capacity. Also, with a huge amount of programming, the virtual agent would be able to appease a large amount of customer questions, even to the point of not needing a customer service team, but only a customer service person, to maintain the “knowledge” of the virtual agent.However, there is still the Human element, which seems to be a variable that even human’s struggle to understand. Therefore, you can almost guarantee that human’s will conceive a question or request that the virtual agent, will not understand. Also, the virtual agent still relies on human input to ensure that it stays current in its “intelligence”.