We need a new test

What Comes After the Turing Test?

Over the weekend, the news broke that a “supercomputer” program called “Eugene Goostman”—an impersonation of a wisecracking, thirteen-year-old Ukranian boy—had become the first machine to pass the Turing Test. Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, who administered the test, wrote, “In the field of Artificial Intelligence there is no more iconic and controversial milestone than the Turing Test, when a computer convinces a sufficient number of interrogators into believing that it is not a machine but rather is a human.” Warwick went on to call Goostman’s victory “ a milestone” that “would go down in history as one of the most exciting” moments in the field of artificial intelligence ...

The Turing test, as we've discussed before (The Turing test and the Chinese Room), is a method of discriminating between machines and people. The article linked to above opines that given the complexity of today's and tomorrow's computers, it's probably time for a successor to the Turing test ... I vote for the Voight-Kampff test, the one used in Blade Runner, which was based on empathy and distinguished between people and replicants :) ....