The Turing Test Was Never About Machines: VII. What Exactly Have We Tested?

Suppose the machine passes.

What has been established?

It has produced a pattern of interaction that a human participant could not reliably distinguish from the interaction produced by a human.

That is already interesting.

But it is not the same as having established that the machine is conscious.

Nor does it settle what kind of intelligence the machine possesses.

It does not show that the machine thinks in the way a human thinks.

And it certainly does not reveal what, if anything, it is like to be the machine.

So what has been tested?

At minimum, the machine has demonstrated an ability to participate in a particular kind of interaction under particular conditions.

But even that description leaves something out.

The human participant has also been involved.

Their expectations, interpretations and responses form part of the situation in which the machine succeeds or fails.

The result therefore belongs neither entirely to the machine nor entirely to the human.

It belongs to the relation between them.

This does not make the test meaningless.

Quite the opposite.

It tells us something important about intelligence itself.

We often treat intelligence as though it were a substance contained inside an individual: something that a sufficiently clever test can measure and report.

But much of what we recognise as intelligence appears in activity.

Following a conversation.

Responding appropriately.

Adapting to another participant.

Repairing misunderstanding.

Using what has happened to shape what happens next.

Intelligence becomes visible in what a system can do within a world of consequences.

The Turing Test therefore tests something real.

But perhaps it tests something more specific than we usually admit.

It tests whether a machine can enter a human practice of recognition so successfully that the distinction between human and machine becomes difficult to sustain within the interaction.

That is not a test of everything we might mean by intelligence.

It is a test of something more relational:

Can this system participate in the conditions under which we recognise intelligence?

And that question leads somewhere unexpected.

Because if intelligence can be recognised through participation in a relationship, then the relationship itself may be part of what intelligence is.

The Turing Test may not have been a test that a machine either passed or failed.

It may have been the first experiment in discovering what happens when we begin treating a machine as someone to talk to.