er hand, I’d be happy to discuss, say,
romantic poetry, the implications of
China’s one-child policy, or the cur-
rent financial crisis, and so on. I can’t
pass a Turing Test, but so what? I can
still be a very interesting conversa-
tionalist. I don’t need to have actually
experienced the pain of hitting my
hand with a hammer to talk about it.
Just like priests don’t need to be mar-
ried to counsel about-to-be-married
young people about married life. They
know about the trials and tribulations
of married life secondhand by having
talked about it all their lives to people
who are married. So, while their mod-
el of marriage might not be as perfect
as the model married people have, it
is a good enough approximation to
provide real insight about marriage.
Think of me in those terms.”
Computers of the future, even if
they never pass a Turing Test, will
potentially be able to see patterns
and relationships between patterns
that we, with all our experience in
the world, might simply have missed.
The phenomenal computing capacity
of computers, along with ever-better
data capture, storage, retrieval, and
processing algorithms, has given
rise to computer programs that play
chess, backgammon, Go, and many
other highly “cognitive” games as
well, or better, than most humans.
They compose music and recognize
speech, faces, music, smells, and
emotions. Not as well as the best hu-
mans—not yet—but this is only the
beginning. And just as the early fail-
ures of AI contributed to our deeper
understanding of the true complexity
of human cognition, these programs
force us to rethink our anthropocen-
tric ideas on the uniqueness of our
cognitive skills. But this rethinking
should not be a cause for a concern.
That a mass of 100 billion slow and
imprecise neurons could organize
themselves over the course of many
millions of years in such a way as to
produce human cognition is an amaz-
ing outcome of evolution. However,
there is no reason to believe this is
the only way to achieve cognition.
Understanding human cognition and
achieving artificial cognition are two
separate endeavors, and, even if each
can inform the other, they should not
be confused.

The goal of building a machine able to pass a Turing Test will long remain elusive and probably never be achieved. But many other great challenges lie ahead, greater even than flawlessly imitating human cognitive behavior down to the last typing mistake. The degree to which progress can be made in AI will be in direct relation to the degree to which the problems to be solved can be represented cleanly and unambiguously. One of the next great challenges of AI will be the development of computer programs designed to discover and prove elegant new mathematical theorems worthy of publication in mathematics journals, not because they were done by a computer but because the mathematics itself will be worthy of publication. Other challenges will be development of programs that make use of the oceans of data now available to find new relationships between diseases and human behavior or the environment. Yet others will be programs that can look at two different pictures and find their analogous elements.

conclusion

It is time for the Turing Test to take a
bow and leave the stage. The way for-
ward in AI does not lie in an attempt
to flawlessly simulate human cogni-
tion but in trying to design comput-
ers capable of developing their own
abilities to understand the world and
in interacting with these machines in
a meaningful manner. Researchers
should be clearer about the distinc-
tion between using computers to un-
derstand human cognition and using
them to achieve artificial cognition,
meaning we need to revise our long-
held notions of “understanding.”
Understanding is not something only
humans are capable of and, as com-
puters get better at representing and
contextualizing patterns, making
links to other patterns and analyzing
these relationships, we will be forced
to concede that they, too, are capable
of understanding, even if that under-
standing is not isomorphic to our
own. Few people would argue that
interacting with people of other cul-
tures does not enrich our own lives
and way of looking at the world. In
a similar, if not identical way, in the
not-too-distant future, the same will
be true of our interactions with com-
puters.

acknowledgments

This work was funded in part by a grant from the French National Research Agency (ANR-10-065-GETPI- MA). Thanks to Dan Dennett and, especially, to Melanie Mitchell for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

 

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Robert M. French ( [e-mail]) is a Research director of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) working at the Laboratoire d’Etude de l’Apprentissage et du développement at the University of Burgundy, dijon, France.