Computer pioneer Alan Turing’s remarks in 1950 on the question, “Can machines think?” were misquoted, misinterpreted and morphed into the so-called “Turing Test”. The modern version says if you can’t tell the difference between communicating with a machine and a human, the machine is intelligent. What Turing actually said was that by the year 2000 people would be using words like “thinking” and “intelligent” to describe computers, because interacting with them would be so similar to interacting with people. Computer scientists do not sit down and say alrighty, let’s put this new software to the Turing Test - by Grabthar’s Hammer, it passed! We’ve achieved Artificial Intelligence!
The Turing Test as it is popularly conceptualized is really more of a test of human intelligence (or stupidity, more likely) rather than that of the machine.
If you put a big enough idiot in front of the screen, Dr. Sbaitso could conceivably “pass.” Well, maybe if you muted it, anyway.
Eliza, a chatbot psychiatry emulator written in the 1960s, convinced many people it was a real person.
Various versions of Eliza are online - including this quaint, retro looking one
Interesting, thanks.