Therefore, while it is tempting to have some quick and simple test to determine whether the hateful bigot in front of me is capable of conversion and therefore worth engaging in dialogue, or is beyond redemption and therefore incapable of conversation (let alone conversion), the act of developing and implementing a "spiritual"
Turing test can easily become a form of theological totalitarianism as reprehensible as the neo-Nazis and white nationalists spouting hatred in Charlottesville.
At the same time, unawareness of or disregard for the synthetic nature of AI under conditions of
Turing test failure is not a universal experience of digitally mediated sexual encounters.
Like Audrey--Lentz's wife who has been mentally debilitated by a spell of anoxia--Peter is a member of the human species whose life has value that cannot be reduced to what the
Turing test inherently identifies as central to being human, that which can be measured by information patterns, intelligent and rational "output." It is not by accident that Powers develops the scene of their meeting: the ethereal, intelligent, wordy, and solipsistic Rick with the embodied, simple child who has wider ranges in some areas than he does.
As we have seen, linguistic behavior cannot speak for semantic behavior; this means necessarily the
Turing Test has too large of an error for even rudimentary semantics.
Now let us pause for a brief Digression on the subject of the
Turing test. The term comes from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," an essay by the British mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing.
Last June, in a competition at the Royal Society in London, John Denning, Sloan '98, drew international attention with a chatbot named "Eugene Goostman." The program, which purported to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian with a bad attitude, became the first to pass the
Turing Test inspired by a 1950 paper on artificial intelligence by computer scientist Alan Turing.
It was after he read Brian Christian's book The Most Human Human--about the
Turing test, an exercise in which the same question is posed to a human and a computer, and a third party decides which answer came from the machine--that Harrison took a stab at writing a two-hander between himself and a computer chat program, though he quickly learned technology isn't quite that sophisticated.
I was reminded of all this by the recent nonsense about a computer passing the
Turing test.
Erie, PA, June 12, 2014 --(PR.com)-- Zabaware's bot Ultra Hal was one of 5 artificially intelligent bots that participated in last weekend's
Turing Test hosted by Reading University at the Royal Society in London.
Young Eugene has just reportedly become the first ever program to pass the
Turing Test which terms it'd seem impolite to call him an it) believed they were talking to a human being.
The machine beat the so-called
Turing Test, named after Second World War codebreaker Alan Turing.
A computer at London's Royal Society fooled a panel of humans into thinking it was human in an experiment that is being hailed as the first example of a machine passing the
Turing Test, the Guardian reported today.