Turing explicitly designed it to account for this EXACT concern. From the "Turing Test" Wikipedia:
> ...the question has become "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?" In other words, Turing is no longer asking whether a machine can "think"; he is asking whether a machine can act indistinguishably from the way a thinker acts. This question avoids the difficult philosophical problem of pre-defining the verb "to think" and focuses instead on the performance capacities that being able to think makes possible, and how a causal system can generate them.
The whole point of the test is that we'll NEVER build a machine that we think is "intelligent" or "thinking", because those words mean about as much as "love" or "meaning" in a scientific or engineering context.
Maybe the fact that we've built computers that pass the test means that we're close to AGI? Worth reexamining some priors :)
What people loosely call “passing the Turing Test” isn’t much like Turing’s imitation game, which is much harder, assuming the humans are playing to win.
A question only someone who frets way to much about AI would ask: are you serious? Or is this just a "other people are dumber than I am" joke? Would be very interested to hear your stance, if the former :)
Partly serious, from the perspective that the goalpost for "clearly" acknowledging AI have been raised every time the previous goalpost was achieved.
Presently, we have LLMs that converse better than most humans, but most people still say they are not artificial intelligence.
In that regard, I think it fair to say that the criteria for acknowledging AI now effectively exceeds the criteria for being a human. In situations like the Turing Test, I'd wager most humans would already comes across as inferior in conversation as compared to our best LLMs.
If the LLM is not intelligent yet it still appears more intelligent than us, then it seems mathematically that our intelligence must be zero (or less).
Very cogent, thanks for the response! I definitely agree. My simple solution to this question is to go back to Turing himself, who designed his test with explicit goal of avoiding terms like "intelligence" in favor of more meaningful ones, like "similarity" or "capability".
Anyone who says that GPT(4) isn't intelligent when it's turning out long, well-reasoned essays on demand seem a little stubborn, IMHO...
> ...the question has become "Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?" In other words, Turing is no longer asking whether a machine can "think"; he is asking whether a machine can act indistinguishably from the way a thinker acts. This question avoids the difficult philosophical problem of pre-defining the verb "to think" and focuses instead on the performance capacities that being able to think makes possible, and how a causal system can generate them.
The whole point of the test is that we'll NEVER build a machine that we think is "intelligent" or "thinking", because those words mean about as much as "love" or "meaning" in a scientific or engineering context.
Maybe the fact that we've built computers that pass the test means that we're close to AGI? Worth reexamining some priors :)