The Google engineer who thinks the company's AI has come to life

[Igel]

6. It can't. Not really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

Given Skinnerian approaches to consciousness at the time, the best it was assumed you could measure was behavior: If the communication with a machine cannot be distinguished from communication with a human, then the machine is as sentient and conscious as a human.

It assumes that humans have no internal life or dialog because it can't be independently, objectively measured. I say I had a dream, I say that I pondered something for hours in meditation, how can I prove it? Well, in Turing's day, you really couldn't. Dick, with Bladerunner as a kind of offspring, was '50s, so Turing-test state of the art.

But questioned, Would androids dream of electric sheep?

These days, it's easier. But what would the analog in computational, semiconductor-chip terms be?


Sadly, the Turing test has made its way into pop culture as *the* definitive test.