The Stupidity of Computers | Issue 13 | n+1

Computers are near-omnipotent cauldrons of processing power, but they're also stupid. They are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can't understand a simple English conversation. IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated two top Jeopardy! players last year, but for the clue “What grasshoppers eat,” Watson answered: “Kosher.” For all the data he could access within a fraction of a second—one of the greatest corpuses ever assembled—Watson looked awfully dumb.

related reading

• alan turing - computing machinery and intelligencecourses.cs.umbc.edu
• Infinite midwit - by Adam Mastroianniexperimental-history.com
• The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Whywaitbutwhy.com
• Perplexityperplexity.ai
• Giving GPT-3 a Turing Testlacker.io
• Memory makes computation universal, remember?thinks.lol
• The Universe of Discourseblog.plover.com
• The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect — LessWronglesswrong.com
• Eugene Goostman - Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
• The dumbest chess AI has a lesson for us - The Atlantictheatlantic.com
• Wolfram|Alpha as the Way to Bring Computational Knowledge Superpowers to ChatGPT-Stephen Wolfram Writingswritings.stephenwolfram.com
• The Turing Test (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)plato.stanford.edu