Computer pioneer Alan Turing’s remarks in 1950 on the question, “Can machines think?” were misquoted, misinterpreted and morphed into the so-called “Turing Test”. The modern version says if you can’t tell the difference between communicating with a machine and a human, the machine is intelligent. What Turing actually said was that by the year 2000 people would be using words like “thinking” and “intelligent” to describe computers, because interacting with them would be so similar to interacting with people. Computer scientists do not sit down and say alrighty, let’s put this new software to the Turing Test - by Grabthar’s Hammer, it passed! We’ve achieved Artificial Intelligence!
I can’t remember who said this, but somebody said the version of the Turing Test as we all remember it is ridiculous: It’s basically saying that the test of intelligence is “Can a chatbot fool one idiot?”
That’s essentially the media-generated Turing Test, but in truth no such test was ever defined by Alan Turing. For me the modern takeaway is don’t extrapolate anything about reality from memes.
More “can fool the average idiot.”
‘Passing’ isn’t fooling a single participant, but the majority of them beyond statistical chance.