The Turing Test Is Backwards
It’s 16 degrees in the Netherlands today and every terrace in Amsterdam is full. Cyclists in shirtsleeves. Tulips standing at attention along the canals. The kind of Tuesday afternoon where nobody’s pretending it’s still winter — everything just is what it is. Which is a good mood for questioning a seventy-six-year-old test that’s entirely about pretending. In 1950, Alan Turing published a paper that didn’t ask can machines think? — he was too careful for that. Instead he proposed a game. Put a human judge behind a screen. On the other side: a person and a machine, both typing. If the judge can’t reliably tell which is which, the machine passes. ...