The flawed Turing test: language, understanding, and partial p-zombies
There is a problem with the Turing test, practically and philosophically, and I would be willing to bet that the first entity to pass the test will not be conscious, or intelligent, or have whatever spark or quality the test is supposed to measure. And I hold this position while fully embracing materialism, and rejecting p-zombies or epiphenomenalism.
The problem is Campbell's law (or Goodhart's law):
The more any quantitative
socialindicator is used forsocialdecision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt thesocialprocesses it is intended to monitor."
This applies to more than social indicators. To illustrate, imagine that you were a school inspector, tasked with assessing the all-round education of a group of 14-year old students. You engage them on the French revolution and they respond with pertinent contrasts between the Montagnards and Girondins. Your quizzes about the properties of prime numbers are answered with impressive speed, and, when asked, they can all play quite passable pieces from "Die Zauberflöte".
You feel tempted to give them the seal of approval... but they you learn that the principal had been expecting your questions (you don't vary them much), and that, in fact, the whole school has spent the last three years doing nothing but studying 18th century France, number theory and Mozart operas - day after day after day. Now you're less impressed. You can still conclude that the students have some technical ability, but you can't assess their all-round level of education.
The Turing test functions in the same way. Imagine no-one had heard of the test, and someone created a putative AI, designing it to, say, track rats efficiently across the city. You sit this anti-rat-AI down and give it a Turing test - and, to your astonishment, it passes. You could now conclude that it was (very likely) a genuinely conscious or intelligent entity.
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