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To my regret, so far I never had the opportunity of meeting Prof Turing personally, and to discuss directly with him our shared interests. Yet I am sure this will happen soon enough, and I look forward to chatting vis a vis with him, in my bad but vivid spoken “English”. In this review I can focus only on some controversial issues; hence I invite my readers to peruse Turing’s paper directly, as I am sure this will prove to be a very exciting (and possibly upsetting) experience for them, as it was for me.
People already started to propose this game as the litmus test of machine intelligence, and call it “the Turing test”! Alas, this completely misconstrues Turing’s point, which is about how we in fact ascribe intelligence, and not on how we should define it.
We should never forget that gay people for a very long time, and still nowadays in many countries, were forced to hide their nature, condemned in courts and put in prison (like Oscar Wilde), and subjected to mandatory “medical” treatment, e.g. taking hormones. Some of them even decided to commit suicide to stop this persecution—all based on a purely conventional distinction.
However, as Turing reminds us, these impressive results are far from sufficient, before we can consider the AI challenge answered: we also need to achieve more practical and embodied manifestations of intelligence, capable of sustaining open-ended action in the world (to see, to react, to act, to learn from direct experience), as well as richer forms of social intelligence (mind ascription, initiative, etc.).
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Castelfranchi, C. Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Topoi 32, 293–299 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9182-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9182-y