The truth about the Turing Test

When bots can pass for human in conversation, it will be a milestone in AI, but not necessarily the significant moment that sci-fi would have us believe. Phillip Ball explores the strengths and limitations of the Turing Test.

Alan Turing made many predictions about artificial intelligence, but one of his lesser known may sound familiar to those who have heard Stephen Hawking or Elon Musk warn about AI’s threat in 2015. “At some stage… we should have to expect the machines to take control,” he wrote in 1951.

He not only seemed quite sanguine about the prospect but possibly relished it: his friend Robin Gandy recalled that when he read aloud some of the passages in his seminal ‘Turing Test’ paper, it was “always with a smile, sometimes with a giggle”. That, at least, gives us reason to doubt the humourless portrayal of Turing in the 2014 biopic The Imitation Game.

Turing has influenced how we view AI ever since – the Turing Test has often been held up as a vital threshold AI must pass en route to true intelligence. If an AI machine could fool people into believing it is human in conversation, he proposed, then it would have reached an important milestone.

What's more, the Turing Test has been referenced many times in popular-culture depictions of robots and artificial life – perhaps most notably inspiring the polygraph-like Voight-Kampff Test that opened the movie Blade Runner. It was also namechecked in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.

But more often than not, these fictional representations misrepresent the Turing Test, turning it into a measure of whether a robot can pass for human. The original Turing Test wasn’t intended for that, but rather, for deciding whether a machine can be considered to think in a manner indistinguishable from a human - and that, even Turing himself discerned, depends on which questions you ask.

What’s more, there are many other aspects of humanity that the test neglects – and that’s why several researchers have devised new variants of the Turing Test that aren’t about the capacity to hold a plausible conversation.

As for the original Turing Test, its future is likely to be online. Already, online gamers can find themselves unsure if they are competing against a human or a “gaming bot” – in fact, some players actually prefer to play against bots (which are assumed to be less likely to cheat). You can find yourself talking to bots in chatrooms and when making online queries: some are used as administrators to police the system, others are a cheap way of dealing with routine enquiries. Some might be there merely to keep us company – a function for which we can probably anticipate an expanding future market, as Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her cleverly explored.

Can education change Japan's 'depressed' generation?

Every lesson at Japanese schools starts with a simultaneous bow. "Let's try that again because your posture wasn't good," says a teacher to a room full of six and seven-year-olds.

She then reminds the children to have their pencil boxes, notepads and textbooks on top of each other and placed at the left corner of their desks. The students obey without a single word of objection. A few hours later, they queue quietly before being served their lunch.

Towards the end of their education this conformist attitude is still evident. Each year, more than half a million university students start looking for work together.

The first step is to perfect a handwritten resume, or CV, because many in Japan believe that students' characteristics and personalities can be judged by the way they write.

All dressed in a black "recruit suit", they then visit hundreds of companies. Bold hues of black, navy or dark grey are the recommended colours for their job-hunting suits.

Stripes are not encouraged. According to the teachers and career counsellors, it is considered risky to be fashionable.

The job-hunting season is a huge part of Japanese life and has even influenced the nicknames given to different generations.

In Japan, there is no Generation X, Y or Z. Born in 1981, I belong to the "employment ice age" generation when university graduates struggled to find work because of the state of the economy. It is believed to have resulted in the highest number of "withdrawn" or "hikikomori" who refuse to leave their rooms after feeling rejected by the society.

The generation before us was much luckier and is known as the "bubble" generation, because the Japanese economy was at its peak as they entered workforce.

There are stark differences between those who witnessed Japan's booming economy and today's youth.

There are a number of nicknames for them: the "relaxed" generation is most commonly used because they were educated under a revised system aimed at freeing children from cramming, or intensive learning.

The "enlightened" generation is another, and it implies that they had only known Japan in its economic decline and had learned not to expect anything, including wealth or even sex.

Their low self-esteem and unhappiness are obvious in the government's annual survey of the country's youth, aged between 13 and 29. Fewer than half of those surveyed (45.8%) said they were happy with themselves, compared to 86% in the US, 83.1% in the UK, or 71.5% in South Korea.

The government wants to change this mindset. It hopes to double the number of Japanese students who study abroad by 2020.

It has also changed the education curriculum so that all primary school children will learn English from the age of 10 when they're in grade 5. Under the previous system, students in public schools did not learn the English language until they were at a junior high school at the age of 13.

But it takes more than just language skills, and the government is trying to overhaul the education and employment systems as part of its economic policy known as Abenomics, after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.