Now I'm quite sure you all know what the 'Turing Test' is. And no, it does not determine whether you are gay or not! Turing's test was a way of determining whether a machine had intelligence and, more importantly, was conscious.
The essence of the test was to ask questions of both a human subject and also a machine/computer subject by the same mechanism - keyboard, monitor - and then see if you could tell the difference between the machine response and a human one. Now, 'correctness' wasn't the issue here as both machine (and possibly) human could tell you when the Battle of Hastings was (assuming the computer had that information in its data store - likewise the human), it was more about asking the kind of subjective questions, like 'How do you fell about the bail out of banks?', 'What do you think about how well Obama/Brown/Sargozy is doing as leader of the respective countries?" Now quite clearly, AI and machine intelligence are not up to it right now - ever held a conversation with an emailable 'help line' which is based around AI algorithms? You can spot them after about the second response. But, nonetheless, it might be possible that in 99% of cases you couldn't tell the difference between a machine response and the human one.
Would that make the machine conscious? If you couldn't tell the difference between a machine and a human, would that perforce not make the machine conscious? After all, you and I have no doubt that another human being is conscious, like us. No? We don't believe our friends, relatives, people we meet in the street are zombies, do we? And yet, we would use exactly the same criteria to judge a human as we would a machine. So is not the machine, if it passes the test, conscious? Do we have any other way of determining its consciousness or otherwise? And yet, importantly, I think, we would in no way deem the computer to be conscious, sentient, even perhaps alive, despite all of the evidence to the contrary. Why?
One of the all pervading myths about our existence revolves around 'Cartesian dualism'. Whether we be Christians, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, agnostics or even Mormans, we are brought up to believe, all evidence to the contrary, that we are special! It is so ingrained in the way we think, that we are the possessors of some divine, 'God' given, spark, that we are more than just the sum of our physical parts, that you would never convince 99.9% of the human population that a computer was 'alive', capable of conscious thought, capable of working out from first principles, just like Descartes, that it was wrong to kill another human being........or a sentient machine.
No, there will never be a conscious machine, a machine able to think, feel like us; or maybe think, feel unlike us, but think, feel just the same. We won't ever believe them!
So why, and don't deny it does, does it always bring a lump to your throat when Eve rebuilds Wall-E at the end of the film and he ignores her, solely interested in what he was programmed to do; compact rubbish. He is, like she is, only a machine!
And then when he recognises her?
We all wish we could talk to the animals - it would so relieve the monotony of being the only species capable of speech on the planet. Perhaps we will, ultimately, have to settle for machines, whether we like or not!
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