Artificial Intelligence, Mind & the Future
The Turing Test
A proposed operational test for machine intelligence: if a human judge, conversing by text with both a machine and a person, cannot reliably tell which is which, the machine is said to have passed.
Proponents
Alan Turing
Evidence For
Sidestepped an unanswerable metaphysical question ("can machines think?") in favor of an operational one anyone could actually run: can a machine's conversation fool a human judge?
Evidence Against
Modern large language models can carry on convincing conversations without most researchers concluding they are conscious or genuinely thinking, widely taken to show that passing the test was never sufficient for real understanding — a gap the Chinese Room Argument had already predicted decades earlier.
Real Sources
Transmissions
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