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(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Thank you to Annabeth Carroll, Vivian Brown, Peter Kung, Sarah Warkentin, and Mom.
ZACH:
My name is Zach Barnett. Can machines think? Until what happened today, I thought that no human-made machine could ever think as a human does. I now know that I was wrong.
I woke up to a phone call. Calling was my best friend, Douglas. Douglas is an experimental computer scientist. He told me that he had created a computer that could pass the Turing Test.
I knew that the Turing Test was supposed to be a way to test a machine's intelligence. Not merely a way to determine whether a machine could simulate intelligence, but a way to determine whether the machine was genuinely thinking, understanding. The 'intelligence test' that Alan Turing proposed was a sort of 'imitation game'. In one room is an ordinary human; in the other is the machine (probably a computer). A human examiner, who does not know which room contains the machine, would engage in a natural language conversation with both 'participants'. If the examiner is unable to reliably distinguish the machine from the human, then, according to Turing, we have established that the machine is thinking, understanding and, apparently, conscious.
I never found this plausible. How could a certain kind of external behavior tell us anything about what it is like for the machine on the inside? Why would Turing think it impossible to create a mindless, thoughtless machine that is able nonetheless to produce all of the right output to pull off the perfect trickery? Furthermore, how could we ever establish that a machine was conscious without actually being that machine?
Despite my skepticism, I was curious to see the computer that Douglas had created. I wanted to have the opportunity to engage in 'conversation' with it, intelligent or not. Unfortunately, I would never have this opportunity. When I arrived, Douglas led me toward 'Room A'. He explained that he wanted to administer the Turing Test and that he wanted me to play the role of the control subject, the human. The computer, Douglas told me, was located in room B. Douglas would be conversing with us both and would thereby be able to...