George Rebane
The Turing test is dead, we are told. There’s a reasonable basis for this assertion, because today’s AIs already convince humans, on a regular basis, that they are talking with another human. So the new goal is AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that is defined as AIs that are ‘smarter’ than all humans in every endeavor. But no one yet knows how to measure ‘smarter’ (i.e. intelligence) for machines since we are still not sure of how to measure it for humans. To me the whole enterprise of searching for the litmus test for measuring the intelligence of rapidly evolving AIs is moot. For all we know, the Singularity has already been achieved, and we will only be able to confirm it in the rearview mirror. Here’s an essay on current efforts to measure machine intelligence – https://spectrum.ieee.org/agi-benchmark .
Peace in Gaza is celebrated by happy dancing in the streets of major Israeli cities. Nothing has happened yet but President Trump is already getting his tux cleaned and pressed for the trip to Stockholm. The line in the sand that Trump drew for all to see was that Hamas would return all the hostages, lay down their guns, and get the hell out of Gaza. And this was to happen by 6pm GMT Sunday 5 October 2025. We are now told that the hostage release will occur in the next few days and begin a long process of negotiating the remaining points of the president’s 20-point peace deal. Given how Trump has handled (i.e. been bamboozled by) Putin over the last months, terminating with the embarrassment in Anchorage, I won’t hold my breath any time soon. Putin was supposed to sit down with Zelinsky to end the Ukraine war, or we would slap ‘secondary sanctions’ on Russia and give Ukraine weaponry to include long-range missiles with the blessing to use them against strategic targets, including cities, deep in Russia. That was the line in the sand for the 15aug25 Alaska summit – so far, nothing. Meanwhile Putin continues to bomb the crap out of Ukraine’s cities, fly drones and fighters over Europe’s NATO countries, while selling its oil and gas all over the world.
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