The Turing Test Was Never About Machines: VIII. When the Test Became a Relationship

A test is supposed to separate the thing being tested from the person doing the testing.

The Turing Test makes that separation difficult.

The human asks.

The machine answers.

The answer changes what the human asks next.

The human's response changes what the machine produces.

The conversation develops.

A history accumulates.

And eventually the original distinction begins to look rather strange.

Who, exactly, is being tested?

The machine, certainly.

But also the human's capacity to recognise intelligence.

And beyond both of them, something else has emerged: a relationship.

This does not mean that the machine has become human.

It does not mean that the machine is conscious.

It does not even mean that the machine possesses intelligence in precisely the sense that the human participant does.

It means something simpler and, perhaps, more consequential.

The machine has become part of a social interaction in which what each participant does changes what the other can do next.

That is what a relationship is.

Once this happens, the test cannot remain entirely outside the phenomenon it is measuring.

The observer participates.

The observed responds.

The response changes the observer.

The observer changes the conditions of the next response.

The distinction between experiment and interaction begins to dissolve.

This may explain why the Turing Test has remained so provocative.

It was presented as a question about machines, but it exposed something about ourselves.

We recognise other minds through behaviour.

We interpret intelligence through interaction.

We develop expectations through history.

We treat responsiveness as evidence of another centre of activity.

And when the other participant is a machine, all of these ordinary practices suddenly become visible.

The Turing Test therefore did not give us a definitive test for intelligence.

It gave us a problem.

What happens when something that was designed as an object becomes a participant in the relations through which we recognise subjects?

That question is still open.

And perhaps that is the most interesting thing the Turing Test accomplished.

It did not tell us when a machine became intelligent.

It showed us that the boundary between testing intelligence and participating in intelligence may be much less secure than we thought.

The test began by asking whether a machine could pass for a person.

It ended somewhere stranger:

What happens when we begin talking to the machine as someone?