The AI of the Beholder

F orget the Turing test. Alan said it best in a neglected paragraph of the original paper in which he first proposed his test:

The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted (442).

Turing’s 1950 prediction was not that computers would be able to think in the future but that we would talk of computers thinking and that, once this happened, what we meant by the term would have morphed in such a way that it would be pretty uncontroversial to say that machines think. Our use of the term has indeed loosened to the point that attribution of thought to even the most basic of machines has become common parlance, at least outside the wretched confines of the philosophy classroom, in which no claim is too obvious...