When Alan Turing posed the question “Can machines think?” back in 1950, the “Turing test” was created to try to answer the question. More than sixty years later we’re still trying to answer that question because no computer to date has been able to pass Turing’s test.
Turing’s method for deciding whether machines can think is by testing “a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.” We’ve known all along that computers can perform a wide variety of tasks faster than humans; Turing, and many others since him, want to know if these machines can impersonate us to a degree that we cannot tell the difference between us and them. In other words, can they not only think but also deceive?
From Wikipedia:
…(I)f the machine is more intelligent than a human being it must deliberately avoid appearing too intelligent. If it were to solve a computational problem that is impossible for any human to solve, then the interrogator would know the program is not human, and the machine would fail the test.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes that, even though no computer has ever passed the Turing test, we’re not far away from finally reaching this milestone.
Some of those who have argued against the importance of a machine's being able to pass the Turing test believe that it’s the deception that’s enough. In other words, if a computer can simply convince us that it’s conscious, does it need to actually be conscious?
Dylan Chandler, a Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication in Vancouver, says in his article in Ethical Technology that “we seem content to grant the benefit of the doubt to other humans when it comes to having consciousness whether we have a rigorous proof for it or not.” Chandler recommends giving machines the same allowances.
No matter which side of the fence you're on when it comes to the Turing test’s importance, the test’s impact in numerous fields of software development cannot be ignored.
