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We presented in this book Alan Turing the man before taking the reader on a journey through the prescient beliefs of this mathematical genius, WWII code-breaker and all-round polymath. From his earliest works, and notions about thinking machines, to implementations of his thought experiment about a machine's ability to answer any questions put to it by a human interrogator, you can see how Turing's ideas are as relevant today as when he originally described them.
Consider the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual gathering of world leaders in Davos, in 2016. The Fourth Industrial Revolution was one of the eight themes of the conference with technology at the forefront of discussions. These included ‘The Transformation of Tomorrow’, ‘What if robots go to war?’ and the ‘State of artificial intelligence’. Nearly 70 years before this, in his 1948 report, Intelligent Machinery, Turing first proposed his test.
As we have seen, machines can now converse improving on the Eliza program's technique to transform an input message into an output question, thereby getting human interlocutors to talk about themselves (see Chapter 9). Of course there remain sophistications in human language that need mastering in machine talk; for example, creating metaphors and analogies to explain unexpected or unusual occurrences through similar or common experiences. This will take time to develop, especially to understand more fully how humans do it.
Do we feel then that the three practical Turing test experiments, especially the 2014 event, realised the kind of thinking machine Turing might have envisaged in 1948? Of course not, … yet. A stronger test would last for longer than five minutes and a machine would need to convince more than half a panel of interrogator–judges that it was human, as Turing felt in 1952, two years after his prediction in the Mind paper.
The three experiments, 2008, 2012 and in 2014 were a start in seriously examining Turing's ideas for a thinking machine. An unpredicted backlash followed the announcement of machine Eugene Goostman's performance in the 2014 Turing test experiment.
Just as Turing had predicted more than half a century before, academics like Stevan Harnad were unimpressed. Harnad tweeted his doubt that the test had actually been passed. Criticism also came from the psychologist and linguist Gary Markus.
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