| You don't need catholics, or appeals to the beauty of sunsets, to question the "Turing Test" (there is no such thing, actually). https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf Here's a quote from Turing: > I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. Let's think about this "70 per cent chance of making the right identification" thing and what Turing means by that. What if I make a fake Turing test? A human interrogator and two humans as subjects. That 70% should remain unchanged. Meaning that in his hypothetical year 2000, about 30% of the time, the interrogator should say that the real human is a machine. So, what was Turing smoking? Why is he predicting that in the 2000s, a human would fail to identify other humans? He's not. If we believe he's a smart guy (I do), he is also saying that about the 50s. At the time, simply there weren't any machines to make humans think of this problem. It's a hard problem to even grasp. I would argue that this is the 1950 version of philosophical zombies, and it is the exact same problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie. He explicitly acknowledges this issue. Turing, therefore, _was_ thinking of the hard problem of consciousness, before it was even defined. In the same paragraph, he makes this remark: > The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any improved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result. What Turing was trying to do, is to isolate this "hard problem of consciousness" and separate it from easier problems we can actually answer. He never said the problem doesn't exist (quite the contrary, as I demonstrated above). He is also saying, quite explicitly as well, that this Imitation Game (or what we now call "The Turing Test") is a thought experiment, not a rule written in stone. What is happening right now in the AI world, is that people are taking these ideas from the 50s, pretending they're rules written in stone, and applying a 50s imagined of the test to machines made in 2025. In other words, they're using an obsolete version. So, this "next Turing Test", where is it? How can I get the latest version? You can't, mostly because AI companies have absolutely no interest in disproving themselves. Their benchmarks are tweaked to show their qualities and hide their shortcomings. With the benefit of hindsight, we know more than Turing. We know this particular class of current machines is prone to hallucinations, and we know they work with a short context. A skilled interrogator in 2025, therefore, knows that. We should update the thought experiment, then devise "a new hypothetical test" based on this new thought experiment. |
Yes exactly. As a computer scientist this is a great thing to do, science is all about taking mushy concepts like "intelligence" and extracting simplified versions of them that are more tractable in technical settings. The trouble is, Turing doesn't seem to want to stop at merely arguing that forgetting about interior consciousness is useful for technical discussions -- he seems to think that interior consciousness shouldn't be important for philosophical or popular notions of thinking and intelligence, either, and that they should update to use something like his test.
So even if you updated the Turing Test for 2025 the church would probably still be writing "Antiqua et Nova" to remind people that -- yes, interior consciousness exists and is important and robot intelligence really isn't the same as human intelligence without it.