contributed articles
Doi: 10.1145/2380656.2380674
Computers interacting with, not imitating,
humans is the way forward.
bY RobeRt m. fRench
moving
beyond the
turing test
aLan tUring WoULd be 100 years old this year. In
1950 he wrote a seminal paper in which he proposed
an operational definition of machine intelligence
designed to sidestep the philosophical quagmire of
what it means to think. 19 Turing proposed pitting a
computer against a human in an “imitation game.”
The computer and human are placed in separate
rooms and connected by teletype to an external
interrogator who can ask any imaginable question of
either entity. The computer tries to fool the interrogator
into believing it is the human; the human tries to
convince the interrogator he or she is the human. If the
interrogator cannot distinguish the computer from the
person, the computer is judged to be intelligent. This
simple test has come to be called the Turing Test.
In the early years of research on artificial intelligence,
the test was taken very seriously, 2, 8 especially because
many researchers believed truly intelligent machines
were just around the corner. 13, 17 But as the 1950s to the
1980s came and went and machines were still no closer
to passing the Turing Test, AI researchers began to
realize how difficult the problem of
simulating human cognition would
actually be. 12 It became clear that human cognition emerges from a complex, tangled web of explicit, knowl-edge-based processes and automatic,
intuitive “subcognitive” processes, 10
the latter deriving largely from humans’ direct interaction with the
world. Presumably, by tapping into
this subcognitive substrate—
something a disembodied computer did
not have—a clever interrogator could
unfailingly distinguish a computer
from a person. 5, 6 The hope faded that
machines would soon be in a position to pass such a test, 7 and serious
researchers in AI focused their energy
elsewhere. 9, 20
In the past decade, however, significant innovation in computer technology and data capture have brought
the Turing Test back into focus. That
technology, along with vast information resources that became available
at the same time, have potentially
brought computers closer than ever
to passing the test. But, in spite of
these developments, the Turing Test
still presents significant hurdles, including some unrelated to machine
intelligence. Questions based on
largely irrelevant aspects of humans’
physiognomy, quirks in their visual,
auditory, or tactile systems, and time
required to complete various cognitive tasks can be devised to trip up a
computer that has not lived life as
we humans have with bodies like our
own.
In what follows, I argue we need
to put aside the attempt to build a
key insights
the time has come to bid farewell
to the turing test.
attempting to build a machine to pass
a no-holds-barred turing test is not the
way forward in ai, regardless of recent
advances in computing technology.
building machines that would never
pass a turing test, but that can interact
with humans in a highly meaningful,
informative way, is the way forward in ai.