The Imitation Game
In his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Alan Turing began with the question ‘Can machines think?’, but, finding it ‘too meaningless to deserve discussion’, instead proposed his ‘imitation game’, more often called the Turing test, to pass which a computer would have to be indistinguishable from a human on the basis of its replies to a series of questions.1 What the paper seeks to answer instead, therefore, is ‘Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?’ He believes the answer is yes and that in the not too distant future ‘one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted’.2 OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, and a year later its CEO Sam Altman made an observation that has since become a commonplace: ‘the turing test went whooshing by and everyone mostly went about their lives’. This means either we’re back, in effect, to asking the question Turing rejected – ‘But is ChatGPT actually thinking?’ – or we must come up with better questions. I believe doing so should begin with something Turing does not address, namely the nature of what is being imitated, or, in other words, what it is to be human.
Fair enough for him not to address it, one might say; such a philosophical question does not deserve discussion in an article about computers (though it was published in Mind). The closest Turing gets to humanistic considerations is to quote, in order to argue against, the neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson, who said, ‘Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain’.3 This Turing labels ‘The Argument from Consciousness’. And just as I think he outs himself as a blank-slatist when he compares a child’s brain to a notebook,4 I cheerfully out myself as a squishy humanist when I say that Jefferson was right then and is right still that machine ≠ brain. No matter how well a stick insect imitates a stick, the nature of the latter remains a separate question. The name’s consciousness. Hard problem of consciousness.
This essay proposes, now that we’re living with AI, to check in with the ancient question of human nature, with the expectation that doing so will tell us about what AI might yet do and about ourselves.
The Imagination Game
In 1926, a quarter of a century before Turing’s paper, when he himself was just fourteen, the Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen published a short story, ‘The Visitor’, in which she coined another term for another game, and a harder one for a computer to play.
