Computing Machinery and Wisdom: Dialogical Education for Turing Children as an Emerging Paradigm for Artificial Intelligence View Digital Media

Workshop Presentation
J Gray Cox  

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems may be extremely smart and yet commit folly because of faulty understandings of all the relevant goals and values. How to achieve genuine wisdom, not mere intelligence? Technological advance now makes it possible to pursue the suggestions Alan Turing provided in the final section of “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Mature and wise systems may result not from algorithms driving Turing Machines engaged in inferential reasoning, but instead, heuristic strategies guiding Turing Children engaged in dialogical, non-inferential reasoning. In what ways do ongoing innovations in hardware and software make it possible now to pursue such developments in AI, drawing on studies of dialogical reasoning in peace studies and related fields? For example, how can AI systems as agents in physical and social contexts draw on interactive parenting and teaching strategies to jump past big data methods in order to learn from tiny samples? This workshop aims at a collaborative exploration of the most creative and promising ways of “socializing” and “educating” Turing “child machines” in dialogical practices that can cultivate wisdom in various combinations and configurations of human and machine systems. A background paper presenting the underlying theoretical ideas will be provided, along with some illustrative examples. The focus of the workshop engagement is on strategies for integrating such ideas with innovations occurring in multiple domains.