Regarding the hard and fast DTV Transition today, /.user ObsessiveMathsFreak had this to say:

REPENT! Repent ye geeky sinners! For the end of days is upon ye!

Lo! As it is written, there shall befall a great and terrible calamity upon all the kin of the nerdy, and their most precious gadgets and devices shall be laid low by the machinations of the wicked! And they shall lament, and make agitated phone calls even in the early hours of the late morning!

And there shall be a great moaning as the geeky rise to diagnose the woes of their parents and uncles and aunts and cousins and neighbors and co-workers and friends and even children! Naught will your warnings save you as the wretched shall pay no need. And ye shall be swamped with piteous wails and whinges as the masses of humanity beat down thy doors and fill up they inboxes with useless protestations and opinions and heed not thy councils.

Thou shalt spend thy last days overseeing the procurement and installation of countless digital devices. Yea, in peoples very living rooms! And thou shalt be condemned to maintain and provide unpaid support for each and every one of these cheap and buggy imports till the end of thy unhappy life.

Repent geeky sinners! Give up thy sinful social ways and cast off thy connections to society, like the mathematicians and programmers of old! Give up thy internet and telephone connections and families and social life! Give up and repent, lest ye be danmed! REPENT!

Unapologetically stolen without permission from here in this discussion. Misspellings included!

I know I’m a dirty hate-monger a lot of the time, but I’m being genuine here today. There are some concepts I feel I have to introduce first before I get to the meat though – don’t those people that say, “I told you that, so I could tell you this” grate on your nerves?

I’d like to first make a distinction between Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Intelligence. On its face, ‘artificial’ implies something fake, something not quite what it’s supposed to be emulating. ‘Synthetic’ on the other hand certainly is what it purports to be, but is something crafted or made. A polyester shirt is certainly a shirt, just as a holographic projection of anything fake. SI is something real, that is why I prefer to use it over AI.

There is a test called the Turing Test which is designed to determine whether an intelligence is human. Imagine two humans chatting with each other over an instant messaging program, and one of those humans is a judge. If the test-subject is human enough, the test-subject passes as human. The same could be true for a Synthetic or Artificial Intelligence. If the judge determines the interaction to be human enough, the subject passes the Turing Test. An Artificial Intelligence that can fool a judge into passing is still artificial, but a Synthetic Intelligence implies it is advanced enough to be indistinguishable from an Organic Intelligence

The way the Turing Test is designed, a human should have no trouble passing the test, but what about those humans with mental retardation (MR)? Provided they have the intelligence to operate the computer, might a subject with MR pass or fail? I really don’t know, and I think the idea is politically incorrect enough to never be tested. It may even fall within the category of people not wanting to know because there are uncomfortable moral implications if humans with MR indeed do not pass the test, most directly “Are mentally retarded humans even human?”

Which finally brings me to my main point: If a Synthetic Intelligence turns out to be mentally retarded, can they pass a Turing Test? My gut says “yes” because for all intents and purposes, from an intellectual level, they are human. Thinking a bit further though, if the intelligence is truly what it is, rather than a facsimile, it may not pass the test at all, and the only way we could know answer is if we empirically gathered data on MR Organic Intelligences.

Another way to answer the unsettling question is to actually develop SI that passes the test and then modify it to have MR and test this new intelligence. This raises a question though: Is this no better than an Artificial Intelligence with a Synthetic as a model? I think it all depends on how the intelligence is created. If it is dialed back from an existing intelligence, then it is artificial. If it is crafted and “grown” to be MR, then it is synthetic.

You may be smiling or frowning now, but if an intelligence is grown, how is the intelligence not organic? Are we playing God and is what we created really alive? If we are created, are we alive? Implications, implications.