"Passing
the Turing Test"
Scientists from the University of Clear Valley reported today that a
computer program they had created was successful in passing the famous Turing test.
Computer scientists around the world are celebrating the achievement of this long-awaited
milestone. Reached from his retirement home, Marvin Minsky, regarded as one of the fathers
of artificial intelligence (AI), praised the accomplishment and said that the age of
intelligent machines had now been reached. Hubert Dreyfus, a persistent critic of the AI
field, hailed the result, admitting that he had finally been proven wrong.
The advent of computers passing the Turing test will almost certainly
not produce the above sort of coverage. We will more likely read the following:
Scientists from the University of Clear Valley reported today that a
computer program they had created was successful in passing the famous Turing test.
Computer scientists reached at press time expressed considerable skepticism about the
accomplishment. Reached from his retirement home, Marvin Minsky, regarded as one of the
fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), criticized the experiment, citing a number of
deficiencies in the method, including the selection of a human "judge"
unfamiliar with the state of the art in AI. He also said that not enough time had been
allowed for the judge to interview the computer foil and the human. Hubert Dreyfus, a
persistent critic of the AI field, dismissed the report as the usual hype we have come to
expect from the AI world and challenged the researchers to use him as the human judge.
Alan Turing was very precisely imprecise in stating the rules of his
widely accepted test for machine intelligence. here is, of course, no reason why a test
for artificial intelligence should be any less ambiguous than our definition of artificial
intelligence. It is clear that the advent of the passing of the Turing test will not come
on a single day. We can distinguish the following milestones:
Level 1 Computers arguably pass narrow versions of the Turing
test of believability. A variety of computer programs are each successful in emulating
human ability in some area: diagnosing illnesses, composing music, drawing original
pictures, making financial
Level 2 It is well established that computers can achieve human
or higher levels of performance in a wide variety of intelligent tasks, and they are
relied upon to diagnose illnesses, make financial
Level 3 A single computer system arguably passes the full
Turing test, although there is considerable controversy regarding test methodology.
Level 4 It is well established that computers are capable of
passing the Turing test. No reasonable person familiar with the field questions the
ability of computers to do this. Computers can engage in a relatively unrestricted range
of intelligent discourse (and engage in many other intelligent activities) at human or
greater levels of performance.
We are at level 1 today. A wide range of expert systems can meet or
exceed human performance within narrowly defined (yet still intelligent) areas of
expertise. The
Level 2 is within sight and should be attained around the end of the
century. As expert systems grow in sophistication and achieve more natural human
interfaces, we will begin to rely on their expertise as much as (if not more than) human
society relies on their idiot savant forebears today.
We will probably begin to see reports of level 3, and newspaper articles
similar to the second one given above, during the first decade of the next century, with
continued controversy for at least several decades thereafter. The first reports will
almost certainly involve significant limitations to Turing's originally proposed
challenge. We are close to having the underlying technology (if not the actual program)
today if we use sufficiently naive judges and provide them with relatively little time to
make their determinations.
Level 4 is what Turing had in mind when he predicted success by the year
2000. Achieving this level is far more difficult than any of the other three. It requires
advanced natural-language understanding, vast knowledge bases of commonsense information,
and decision-making algorithms capable of great subtlety and abstraction. Turing's
prediction, made in 1950, will almost certainly not be fulfilled by the year 2000. I place
the achievement of level 4 sometime between 2020 and 2070. If this turns out to be the
case, then Turing will have been off by a factor of between 1.4 and 2.4 (70 to 120 years
versus his prediction of 50 years), which actually is not bad for such a longterm
prediction. Of course, there is no assurance that my prediction will be any more accurate
than Turing's.
As mentioned earlier, Hubert Dreyfus has indicated that he will concede
that he was wrong (and has been wrong for his entire professional career) if he can be
fooled as the human judge in a Turing test. Will this happen? If we assume that Dreyfus is
in good health and further that continuing advances in bioengineering technology enable
him (and the rest of us) to live longer than today's average life expectancy, then it is
altogether possible. Personally, I would be willing to bet on it.
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The Age of Spiritual Machines