The Turing Test : Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence

Rating:
Summary: Pure philosophy
Review: The Turing test is one of the most popular tests for judging whether a machine is intelligent, and is one that for many years was accepted uncritically. This has had both good and bad consequences for the field of artificial intelligence, but has certainly been good for the philosophical community. Debates on the Turing test have filled the philosophical literature, and continue to this day. Fortunately, many researchers in artificial intelligence have moved away from the assumption that the Turing test is a useful guideline for assessing machine intelligence. In the years ahead it may become merely an historical curiosity, possibly fading into insignificance because of the presence of (non-human) thinking machines brought about the very people who chose to ignore its validity or utility and got on with the actual construction of these kinds of machines.

This book gives a good overview of the history of the Turing test, includes three of the original papers of Turing, and also gives what the editor of the book calls "precursors" to the subject. As examples of the latter, he includes some writings of the philosopher Rene Descartes and Julien Mettrie. Many other papers are included, some of these written by well-known philosophers and researchers in artificial intelligence, and the editor includes commentary on some of these papers at various places in the book. Most, if not all, of the discussion in this book is purely philosophical, and therefore does not assist those who are genuinely interested in building intelligent machines. The book therefore will be useless to the collection of researchers engaged in the design and construction of intelligent machines. It will however be very interesting to philosophers, who are not troubled by the gigantic conceptual spaces that are constructed by the deliberations over the Turing test, and they will be able to find ample opportunity to indulge themselves in the proliferation of thought experiments and "impossibility proofs" that always accompany philosophical discussion of machine intelligence.