The Turing Test, also known as the “imitation game,” was created by Alan Turing in 1950 to distinguish between males and females. It involved three participants – a man, a woman, and an interrogator. The interrogator would ask questions about their physical attributes to determine their gender, but the participants could deceive them by providing false information. Turing later expanded this idea by incorporating computers into the test. He predicted that within fifty years, computers would possess human-like intelligence. To support his prediction, he proposed a scenario where an interrogator engages in written conversations with both a human and a computer without knowing which is which. If the interrogator fails to differentiate between them through questioning, it would be unfair not to consider the computer as “intelligent.” Passing this test required consistently deceiving the interrogator at least half of the time.
Both Turing and Godwin shared the belief that any entity capable of passing the Turing Test could truly be considered a thinking and intelligent being. Moreover, they asserted that success in passing the test demonstrated the computer’s competence in engaging with humans by effectively discussing subjects of human interest. Additionally, Godwin argued that passing the test implied the computer’s ability to comprehend human thought processes and social interactions.
Despite the belief of Turing and Godwin that computers could think, many disagreed. In his book called Can Animals and Machines Be Persons?, Goodman presented an objection known as the “Chinese-box” argument. This involved placing a man (who did not know Chinese) in a box where textual messages, similar to those in the Turing Test, would be displayed on a screen in English or Chinese. The man inside the box would respond appropriately in Chinese, despite his lack of knowledge, using a “Chinese Turing Test Crib Book”. The goal was for the person asking the questions to be unable to differentiate the man’s Chinese responses from those of a native speaker. This argument was highly impactful. By describing the Chinese-box argument, Goodman highlighted that it would appear as though the man in the box understood both English and Chinese, when in reality he was merely translating symbols. Computers essentially did the same thing, translating their binary code into symbols that humans could comprehend.The text suggests that in order to achieve this, they would employ similar rules as those found in the “Chinese Turing Test Crib Book.” Ultimately, the Chinese-box argument argues that while a computer can cleverly mimic thinking and comprehension, it can never truly be a genuine “thinker” or “person.”
