That will take a long time.” Turing and ComputingĪ polymath if there ever was one, Alan Turing was a mathematician, computer scientist, biologist and even a philosopher. There is a matrix of social interconnectedness that we intuitively know. “We have all sorts of relationships that define us - with children, parents, friends, colleagues, groups, and organizations. “For artificial intelligence to fully pass the Turing Test, it would have to understand what it means to be human,” said Bruce Swett, the chief AI architect at Northrop Grumman. The ability to understand artificial intelligence can give us insights into our strengths and weaknesses as humans. The test, in fact, is even more important today as artificial intelligence gains new abilities, as well as prompting us to consider what it means to be human. Surely, at some point, you’ve wondered if the “representative” answering your question on a company’s website was either a well-programmed chatbot or a human being.īut just because we can be occasionally tricked into thinking that a chatbot is human doesn’t mean the 70-year-old Turing Test is in any way dated, that it could apply only to an era when the expectations of computers were lower, when large mainframes didn’t actually speak and the idea of a chatbot would have seemed like science fiction. Some scientists contend that taken at face value, the test has already been aced by AI-supported chatbots. If you could go back in time to 1950 and have Alan Turing speak to a chatbot with a smartphone, he might declare a winner of his test to determine if a computer was “intelligent.” With the invention of the mobile phone 23 years away and the voice-powered virtual assistant inside smartphones even further in the future, no one in Turing’s time would have imagined that computers could be as advanced as the ones we take for granted today - or that they could also fit inside a pocket.Īt its essence, the Turing Test challenges computer scientists to create a program with a conversational ability that a judge can’t distinguish from a human.

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