Siri and the turing test

[Rynn]

It's pretty clear that the original incarnation of the Turing test is flawed. Which shouldn't be much of a surprise given that it was proposed over sixty years ago and computer science has advanced in ways that beg belief. The assumption behind the Turing test is that if a machine can pretend to be a human then it is of equivalent intelligence to a human, the idea being to separate the complex notion of consciousness from the more practical concept of capability. The problem is that development over the past several decades has given us a wealth of technologies that allow us to break down tasks previously thought to require a human-level intelligence and get relatively simple machines to use it.

So you're right, we can make computers good enough to fool some people and there are humans that can't pass it. In that manner the Turing Test is useless. But we could play around with it for the setting. Our current article on the Turing Test is very short and very old. We could perhaps write it up that the Turing test was revised over time to include multiple (and in the end a huge amount of-) every day tasks that a single software package was submitted to. The idea being to apply the label of "Passed the Turing test (edition 12)" to show that the software in question was human-equivalent in capability. Separate to this is the idea of sophonce. Just because a machine is human capable in every field humans are doesn't mean that it has an ego or self identity. The development of a test of sophonce would be far more useful than a Turing test in dealing with the matter of if a machine is a conscious entity. Just what that test would be I can't guess, I imagine it would involve taking a detailed look at the entity in question's mind and having a sound theory of consciousness to know what to look for.