Turing Tests

The only capacity in which I had heard the term “Turing” was in relation to a “Turing test.” To be honest, I did not even realize that the name belonged to someone. The idea seemed preposterous to me at first, how could someone mistake a computer for a human? But when you break down the digital machine into its base components (store, executive unit, control), what makes it so different from the human brain? The way that we learn, process, and call upon information, Turing believed, could be mimicked by a machine, an intelligent machine.

Look at the technology we have today. We have machines that compete with people on Jeopardy. We have phones that can recognize our voice and respond in a quick and precise manner. Not only have we surpassed Turing’s idea to create a machine that could play chess at a simple level, we have built chess-playing machines that are unbeatable. Our view of digital machines has changed drastically since Turing’s time. We used to view them as novel, but ultimately unnecessary, extensions of our own abilities. Now we revere these machines. We rely heavily on them to guide us through our lives. We find no greater pleasure than in machines that learn our preferences; that adapt to suit our individual personas.

But we keep them at arm’s length. We have to confine this artificial intelligence into contexts that are decidedly artificial. That is the whole point of the Turing test, isn’t it? To make sure that we can still determine between human and inhuman. We say that if a computer can fool us, then it has passed the test. But that begs the bigger question: do we want them to pass?