The Age of Intelligent Machines
"Passing the Turing Test"
by Ray Kurzweil
Scientists from the University of Clear Valley reported today that a computer program they had created was successful in passing the famous Turing test. Computer scientists around the world are celebrating the achievement of this long-awaited milestone. Reached from his retirement home, Marvin Minsky, regarded as one of the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), praised the accomplishment and said that the age of intelligent machines had now been reached. Hubert Dreyfus, a persistent critic of the AI field, hailed the result, admitting that he had finally been proven wrong.
The advent of computers passing the Turing test will almost certainly not produce the above sort of coverage. We will more likely read the following:
Scientists from the University of Clear Valley reported today that a computer program they had created was successful in passing the famous Turing test. Computer scientists reached at press time expressed considerable skepticism about the accomplishment. Reached from his retirement home, Marvin Minsky, regarded as one of the fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), criticized the experiment, citing a number of deficiencies in the method, including the selection of a human "judge" unfamiliar with the state of the art in AI. He also said that not enough time had been allowed for the judge to interview the computer foil and the human. Hubert Dreyfus, a persistent critic of the AI field, dismissed the report as the usual hype we have come to expect from the AI world and challenged the researchers to use him as the human judge.
Alan Turing was very precisely imprecise in stating the rules of his widely accepted test for machine intelligence. here is, of course, no reason why a test for artificial intelligence should be any less ambiguous than our definition of artificial intelligence. It is clear that the advent of the passing of the Turing test will not come on a single day. We can distinguish the following milestones:
Level 1 Computers arguably pass narrow versions of the Turing test of believability. A variety of computer programs are each successful in emulating human ability in some area: diagnosing illnesses, composing music, drawing original pictures, making financial judgements, playing chess, and so on.
Level 2 It is well established that computers can achieve human or higher levels of performance in a wide variety of intelligent tasks, and they are relied upon to diagnose illnesses, make financial judgements, etc.
Level 3 A single computer system arguably passes the full Turing test, although there is considerable controversy regarding test methodology.
Level 4 It is well established that computers are capable of passing the Turing test. No reasonable person familiar with the field questions the ability of computers to do this. Computers can engage in a relatively unrestricted range of intelligent discourse (and engage in many other intelligent activities) at human or greater levels of performance.
We are at level 1 today. A wide range of expert systems can meet or exceed human performance within narrowly defined (yet still intelligent) areas of expertise. The judgements of expert systems are beginning to be relied upon in a variety of technical and financial fields, although acceptance in the medical area is much slower. Also, computer success in a variety of artistic endeavors is beginning to be at least arguably comparable.
Level 2 is within sight and should be attained around the end of the century. As expert systems grow in sophistication and achieve more natural human interfaces, we will begin to rely on their expertise as much as (if not more than) human society relies on their idiot savant forebears today.
We will probably begin to see reports of level 3, and newspaper articles similar to the second one given above, during the first decade of the next century, with continued controversy for at least several decades thereafter. The first reports will almost certainly involve significant limitations to Turing's originally proposed challenge. We are close to having the underlying technology (if not the actual program) today if we use sufficiently naive judges and provide them with relatively little time to make their determinations.
Level 4 is what Turing had in mind when he predicted success by the year 2000. Achieving this level is far more difficult than any of the other three. It requires advanced natural-language understanding, vast knowledge bases of commonsense information, and decision-making algorithms capable of great subtlety and abstraction. Turing's prediction, made in 1950, will almost certainly not be fulfilled by the year 2000. I place the achievement of level 4 sometime between 2020 and 2070. If this turns out to be the case, then Turing will have been off by a factor of between 1.4 and 2.4 (70 to 120 years versus his prediction of 50 years), which actually is not bad for such a longterm prediction. Of course, there is no assurance that my prediction will be any more accurate than Turing's.
As mentioned earlier, Hubert Dreyfus has indicated that he will concede that he was wrong (and has been wrong for his entire professional career) if he can be fooled as the human judge in a Turing test. Will this happen? If we assume that Dreyfus is in good health and further that continuing advances in bioengineering technology enable him (and the rest of us) to live longer than today's average life expectancy, then it is altogether possible. Personally, I would be willing to bet on it.
Copyright © 1996, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.