The Other Turing Test

If Alan Turing hadn’t died in 1954, he’d be 100 years old today.  If Alan Turing hadn’t committed suicide at the age of 42, about a month after I was born, he might have lived to see the age of the internet, for which he was largely responsible.  If Alan Turing hadn’t

Alan Turing

been persecuted and, in fact, prosecuted for his  homosexuality, he probably wouldn’t have committed suicide and he might be better known and appreciated as one of the great scientists and inventors of the modern era.  If society actually honored its heroes and geniuses, instead of shitting all over them for being different from the norm (which is pretty much a prerequisite for genius), we might have colonies on Mars, magnetic trains gliding silently all across the Earth, robot servants and 300 year life spans by now.

That’s a whole lot of ifs.

Turing, of course, was the man who broke the Nazi code, doing more to defeat the Nazis then any other individual.  His work led to the development of the computer.  There are very few examples in human history of someone who gave so much being treated so badly.  Socrates.  Jesus Christ.  Alan Turing.  That’s about it.

His name is probably best remembered because of the Turing Test, which he first described in 1950  (5 years after he saved the world, 4 years before he was arrested for being gay).  The Turing Test is how we will know when artificial intelligence has been achieved.  Basically, the idea is that we’ll know it’s here when a computer can fool you into thinking it’s a human being.

We’re almost there.  People respond to robotized over the phone surveys and some people  use Google translator and actually think it makes sense, so some computers can fool foolish  people some of the time.  As they are becoming steadily more sophisticated, it’s only a matter of time.

But, how will we know when we have achieved actual human intelligence?  It’s equally simple.  We will know that we have become intelligent and emotionally mature as a species when we stop trying to throw people in jail for doing things that don’t harm anybody.  That is the other Turing Test, and so far we are failing badly.