What on earth qualified me to judge the Turing test, the gold standard for artificial intelligence (AI)? I’ve been sceptical – but I hope open-minded – about the whole idea for years. But then, I am human (mainly). I did write a short biography of Alan Turing himself. And it was Turing, in 1950, who first suggested a mathematical proof that computers would one day assume a kind of humanity. Public interest in this isn’t just down to rising interest in Turing himself. The test he set out is the basis for the controversial idea of “singularity”, the moment when AI comes of age and computers start thinking and learning for themselves. Turing said that, when you were convinced you couldn’t tell the computer and human apart during a conversation, then the test would have been passed. No computer program seemed close to passing so, in 1990, the inventor Hugh Loebner founded the prize that bears his name, a kind of Turing test lite. This culminates in the top four computer programs talking to the judges individually via a screen for 25 minutes each, while each judge is simultaneously having a conversation with a human. At the end of each session, the judges have to decide which was which. I felt surprised, but hugely privileged, to be asked to be one of four judges last weekend, and presented myself fashionably late at Bletchley Park, where the Loebner prize has been held in recent years (it began in Massachusetts), and where Turing helped crack the Nazi Enigma code. The other judges included a branding expert, a Sky News technology journalist and a robotics expert describing herself as a “robot psychiatrist”. I had a moment of nerves a few minutes into the process when my fellow judges made noises to indicate they knew which was which in their conversations, and I was not completely sure about mine (I was in fact engaged with this year’s winner, Steve Worswick’s Mitsuku program). In the event, one of the four programs was malfunctioning, spouting stuff about not understanding the letter “a”. That left three, and it became clear to me pretty quickly that the sheer perfection of the answers from the robots – perfectly spelled and grammatical – gave them away. The real humans demonstrated their authenticity by their imperfections, second thoughts, hesitations and mis-typings. One program reflected back my own mistakes – I wrote “tecah” instead of “teach” – which was clever but not quite human either. Nor, in the end, was the program we all judged the best shot, which required a strategy for avoiding questions it couldn’t answer. When I asked which part of San Francisco it came from, the robot replied: “Why don’t we talk about that later?” But then, arguably, my question wasn’t really fair either – it would have been like asking how many sandwiches were left in their room (I asked that and was told later that it was “borderline sneaky”). We judges needed strategies too. I asked about loving and hating the same person at the same time, an idea I thought might be alien to robots. I also told the old cracker joke about why French people have only one egg at breakfast (answer: because one is un oeuf). One of the robots told me the joke about Tiny the newt (why is it called Tiny? Because it’s my newt). I asked why it was funny. It sidestepped the question. The programs we talked to were huge achievements. Their non sequiturs and rapid changes of subject certainly seemed human in a Pinter-esque way. But in the end, they were trying to trick us into thinking they were human rather than communicating on an equal basis. The experience has convinced me that AI is not going to produce thinking robots any time soon, and I have a feeling that by the time they have cracked the human question, we will have changed it. It isn’t the infallibility of people that makes them human, after all. Quite the reverse; it is their sheer fallibility – their ability to make mistakes, be quirky, make relationships, love and care. It is more unnerving, not more reassuring, to be phoned by a robot that is nearly human than it is to be phoned by an obvious machine. It may be that computers will be able to do all that one day, but I noticed that I had built some kind of relationship with all four human beings I talked to through a screen, but not with any of the robots, though we had talked just as much. In the meantime, I tend to fall back on the CS Lewis maxim: “When you meet anything that is going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”
Artificial intelligence failed to convince a panel of people that they were also human at the last weekend Turing test, named after Alan Turing , creator of the second computer. one of the testers, author Alan Turing , noted that the AIs failed to understand jokes. Though one of the robots told a joke, when asked why it was funny, the AI lacked an answer. The AIs being tested were “huge achievements”, Boyle said, but their lack of mistakes gave them away. Alan Turing ’s theory is that the fallibility of humanity is what makes us human, and the robots’ inability to grasp this is why “thinking robots” will not be produced any time soon.