The Trouble with the Turing Test

"One AI champion, Yorick Wilks, goes even further: he has questioned how we can even be sure that other humans think, and suggests that something like the Test is what we actually, if unconsciously, employ to reassure ourselves that they do. Wilks (not to be confused with Maurice Wilkes, quoted earlier) offers us here a reductio ad absurdum: the Turing Test asks us to evaluate an unknown entity by comparing its performance, at least implicitly, with that of a known quantity, a human being. But if Wilks is to be believed, we have unknowns on both sides of the comparison; with what do we compare a human being to learn if he thinks?"


Mark Halpern, "The Trouble with the Turing Test," The New Atlantis, Number 11, Winter 2006, pp. 42-63.

Read the whole article Here.