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The Question

  1. 01The Question
  2. 02The machines arrive
  3. 03The uncomfortable question
  4. 04A peculiar habit of mind
  5. 05What Turing had already built
  6. 06Unsatisfied
  7. 07What does it mean to think?
  8. 08The definition problem
  9. 09The Imitation Game
  10. 10Why this sidesteps the problem
  11. 11Why this was radical
  12. 12Meet ELIZA
  13. 13What did you notice?
  14. 14The question is still open
  15. 15Reinforce your understanding
  16. 16Question: Turing's move
  17. 17Question: Behavior
  18. 18Question: Limits of the test
  19. 19Quiz: answer
  20. 20The question follows you
  21. 21Want to go deeper?
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The question is still open

In 1950, Turing made a prediction: by the year 2000, a machine might be able to fool an average interrogator about 30 percent of the time after five minutes of conversation.

He was roughly right. But when machines eventually became good enough to fool some judges, people did not conclude that the machines were thinking. They argued about the test instead. The goalposts moved.

Turing anticipated that too. In the same paper, he described what he called the : the persistent claim that machines can never really do certain things, like use language properly, learn from experience, or produce something genuinely new. Each time a machine clears one of those bars, the bar gets raised.

The question he asked in 1950 is still open. Every serious answer so far has turned into a new question.

Citations(3)↓
  1. 1. plato.stanford.edu
  2. 2. academic.oup.com
  3. 3. aima.cs.berkeley.edu