JUDGING by the tone of the tweets, you might have thought the age of sentient machines had finally dawned. The reason? A chatbot passed the Turing test, widely assumed to be the gold standard of artificial intelligence.
Sort of. To pass the test, a machine must dupe judges into declaring it human after a conversation. This bot, posing as a Ukrainian teenager, just about succeeded. But it鈥檚 not the first.
Alan Turing鈥檚 vision, while resonant, has proved ill-suited to the online world. With even crude spambots fooling humans every day, his test now seems more to do with human gullibility than machine smarts.
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It needs updating. There are versions that take richer views of intelligence 鈥� but these haven鈥檛 captured the public imagination. We need a test that measures many facets to get at the crucial question: can machines think? That really would be worth getting excited about.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淭uring test鈥檚 time has passed鈥�
