Thinking About Turing

The implicit idea about his test seems to be that there are certain things that cannot be mimicked. Any increasingly improved attempts at developing machines that mimic features of intelligence is an attempt at developing machines that have features of intelligence.

Example: a formal system "mimicking" the process of subtraction is indeed doing subtraction in the same way any human would do.

Criticism focuses on "who" does the subtraction. The answer would be that the machine is the one doing the subtraction.

C: There is no one in the machine.

A: Is there someone in your brain?

C: Whatever. A current robot mimicking a conversation, how is that conversation genuine?

A: It was never stated that current machines are capable of conversation only that they are getting closer.Current machines are, of course, unable of conversation.

C: What makes you think that they will ever handle a conversation?

A: Firstly, I have no proof that they won't so the possibility is open. Secondly, even if no work is done directly on making machines capable of conversation, indirect work in the field of Natural Language Processing brings us closer to machines capable of conversation.Thirdly, conversation can be mimicked. But conversation draws on features which cannot currently be mimicked such as the ability to learn new concepts based on previous ones and the ability to use grammatical rules to generate novel sentences. It seems to me that if these features are successfully "mimicked" we will have a machine as capable of a conversation as a child. Working on that which cannot be mimicked is the key.