In the 1950s, when Artificial Intelligence was merely a science-fiction concept, Alan Turing came up with a test to figure out if a computer could (hypothetically) think like a human. This test was like a game where a computer and a human would interact with a separate Judge, both trying to convince the Judge that they were the real human, and not the other.
So, a common scenario of an imitation game, set up so that both Human and Machine could interact with the Judge only by text messages on a computer screen. If the Judge would make mistakes half the time, then it would be said that the Machine passed the test.
You know, that very-humanly stuff.
However, all these questions and their answers, from both Human and Machine would sound the same. Regardless whether the one to answer has actually felt all those things or not, the answer is still a similar sequence of words on a monitor. Any effect can be mimicked even in the absence of the cause.
But the most frustrating part is not realizing that there is no question that would defy this limitation. The most frustrating scenarios is, instead, to imagine the Test from the perspective of the Human itself, trying to respond to the questions so as to prove his own authenticity as a living person. It’s almost claustrophobic - How would you prove you are the Human if the only thing you can use is a keyboard?
This is not necessarily a novel thought experiment. We play this Imitation game throughout our day, both as the Judge and as the suspected Imitator. It’s called Society. With each new interaction, we have to decide if the other one has any malicious hidden intention, with each new piece of information, we have to filter the bias (and in the worse cases, detect de fake news). It’s not trivial to spot when you’re being sold an idea.
The problem with the setup of the Turing Test paradigm is that it tries to design a way in which to showcase the intelligence of the Machine but manages to do so by constricting the intelligence of the Human.
The Turing Test offers a very narrow window of expression for the attributes we evaluate in order to make a very complex assessment. It’s no coincidence that the test defines the Human and Machine as communicating (only) through text. Text is relatively easy to produce by a Machine (today stands as proof, but even for Alan Turing’s times this was intuitively feasible) - but is it sufficient?
In a way, text is a sufficient canvas for a good deal of our gathered knowledge. One could imagine a vastly-long book that would contain our entire history. Another colossal book could fit all our mathematics and another could contain our physics and chemistry laws and so on. Of course, this is a hypothetical example, as no writer and no reader could actually conceive of these volumes of information. But we can agree that this knowledge has a valid correspondence to a sequence of characters, however long it might be.
So we could draw the conclusion that text would be enough for the Machine to prove that it has understood our sciences. The Judge would ask the formula for an atomic reaction and it would correctly output the characters that make up that very formula (probably in a more reliable manner than the Human). And so on and so forth. But this is not the hypothesis of the Test. The Turing Test aims to establish whether the Machine is equivalent to the Human.
And for this, text becomes a too-narrow of a global. The Test would be immensely harder to pass if the Judge could also evaluate the voice, the features of the face and the movements of the two.
Of course, we could include these, too. And maybe there will come a day when even this definition is surpassed by some spectacular features of engineering. These are simply additional layers the Machine would have to imitate, as well. We currently have Artificial Intelligence able to hold very decent conversations, in text. We also have systems (albeit not as performant) able to synthesize speech from written content. And, just as well, we have humanoid robot technology that imitates human movements and gestures (pretty convincing if seen from a sufficient far away distance).
This is the importance of the communication medium in the Turing Test. The question of intelligence in the test is, in fact, a question of how low- or high-definition is the communication window between the Human, Machine and the Judge. All communicated intelligence in the test is limited to its own projection in this expression space. It’s like a game of shadows in which we never can know more about the others than what we manage to see on the projection screen. And this raises some new problems.
The matter is not as straight-forward when discussing Human-to-human interactions. In a way, we have been accustomed to this kind of practical superficiality since forever. If you go to the post office, you won’t be particularly interested in the intimate life of the clerk handling your letters, but only in the projection of his life that is his current job. And we call someone who efficiently detaches the themselves from the job “a professional” and rightfully so, reward and encourage it.
The first workforce sectors to be (already) taken over by Artificial Intelligence are, by no coincidence, Customer Support and Copy-writing. And they did so not because the AIs have achieved self-awareness or any deeper form of thought. No, they didn’t because we know the exact mathematical criteria these AI models were trained against (these models were trained on a text completion task, generating the next token for a given sequence). The fact is that, in these situations, true Human intelligence is somewhat an overkill. The job of a customer support agent requires answering a set of questions with pre-defined information and announcing a supervisor when needed. Why would we need the self-awareness of a living-, breathing-, loving-, suffering-, caring-, thinking- human for this?
Apart from the question of unemployment (which has been recurrent regardless of the technological advancement), this does not necessarily pose an existential crisis for humankind. But now consider how the personal life of an individual has changed, as well. We are gradually turning our innermost necessities into optimized commodities: the need of relating to a friend, the need for connecting with a partner. Even the need to be able to randomly strike an unexpected conversation with a stranger. All this is fundamentally tied to our own sense of being, which isn’t compatible with the projection in the lower-dimensional space of efficiency.
We find ourselves more accustomed to sending an emoji, rather than elaborating our response in a sentence (In fact it already feels awkward to do otherwise). We can exchange memes and instantly convey a certain type of attitude towards a however-complex topic. An image is worth 1000 words, so make a video! It’s true, there’s efficiency at play here. But let us not forget, this is not us working at our job at trying to do more in less the time, this is us trying to optimize being ourselves.
The Turing Revolution, let’s call it, the moment when human-like machines will operate seemingly indistinguishable from their fellow human counter-parts, might not be that far down the road. It doesn’t have to be all cyborgs and robots and what-nots. It might as well be much more simpler and familiar to the present day. We might have turned our interactions into something sufficiently superficial, so that there is no more granularity to distinguish, no more substance to sense behind. The game of imitation reduces to the same usage of the same emojis. We might lose the Turing test ourselves, not for the intelligence of Machines but for the flatness of Humanity.