The Turing Test Was Never About Machines: V. The Machine That Became an Interlocutor

An object can produce a response without being an interlocutor.

A door opens when pushed.

A thermostat changes when the temperature changes.

A search engine returns results when a query is entered.

In each case, something happens in response to something else.

But we do not normally call this conversation.

An interlocutor is different.

An interlocutor participates in a relation in which what has already happened changes what can happen next.

This is why conversation has a peculiar structure.

The meaning of an utterance depends partly on what came before it. The next contribution depends partly on what has just been said. The participants continually modify the conditions of their own interaction.

The machine in a Turing Test therefore becomes interesting at precisely the point where its responses begin to function this way.

It answers not merely the question that was asked, but the question in this conversation.

It can refer back.

It can follow a developing line of thought.

It can respond to correction.

It can change direction.

It can make the next contribution possible.

At that point, calling it an imitation becomes increasingly inadequate.

Not because the machine has thereby become human.

But because the relevant unit of analysis has changed.

We are no longer looking at a machine producing outputs.

We are looking at a relation in which the machine's outputs alter the subsequent activity of another participant, whose responses in turn alter what the machine produces next.

The machine has become part of the organisation of the conversation.

This is a modest claim, but an important one.

It does not require consciousness.

It does not require that the machine understand in the same way a human does.

It does not even require that we settle what intelligence ultimately is.

It requires only that the machine's contribution has become consequential within the interaction.

Something said changes what can be said.

And once that happens, the machine is no longer merely answering us.

It is participating in what happens next.

That is what an interlocutor is.

The Turing Test may therefore have been asking a more interesting question than whether a machine could imitate a human:

When does something we are talking to become part of the conversation?

And once it does, the conversation has a past.