But anyway, the main goal now, as suggested by Toby Ord and others, is to design a better Turing test, something that can give AI designers something to aim at, and that would be a meaningful test of abilities
We want a test to tell us when an AI is intelligent and powerful. But we'll know a powerful AI even without a test, because we'll see it using its power and achieving things that really matter, and not just things that matter when it's an AI that does them.
I fear a new test would be a red herring. The Turing test has inspired people to come up with narrow AIs that are useless for anything other than passing the test. A new test might repeat the same story. Or it might turn out to be too hard and only be achieved long after many other AI capabilities that would greatly change the world.
Either one would be a poor target for AI designers to aim at. It would be better for them to aim at real world problems for the AI to solve.
We want a test to tell us when an AI is intelligent and powerful. But we'll know a powerful AI even without a test, because we'll see it using its power and achieving things that really matter [...] narrow AIs [can be made that are] useless for anything other than passing the test. A new test might repeat the same story. Or it might turn out to be too hard and only be achieved long after many other AI capabilities that would greatly change the world.
I think we'll see (arguably have already seen) AI changing the world before we see a general AI passing t...
So the Turing test has been "passed", and the general consensus is that this was achieved in a very unimpressive way - the 13 year old Ukrainian persona was a cheat, the judges were incompetent, etc... These are all true, though the test did pass Turing's original criteria - and there are far more people willing to be dismissive of those criteria in retrospect than were in advance. It happened about 14 years later than Turing had been anticipating, which makes it quite a good prediction for 1950 (in my personal view, Turing made two mistakes that compensated - the "average interrogator" was a much lower bar than he thought, but progress on the subject would be much slower than he thought).
But anyway, the main goal now, as suggested by Toby Ord and others, is to design a better Turing test, something that can give AI designers something to aim at, and that would be a meaningful test of abilities. The aim is to ensure that if a program passes these new tests, we won't be dismissive of how it was achieved.
Here are a few suggestions I've heard about or thought about recently; can people suggest more and better ideas?
My current method would be the lazy one of simply typing this, then waiting, arms folded:
"If you want to prove you're human, simply do nothing for 4 minutes, then re-type this sentence I've just written here, skipping one word out of 2".