Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought this was cruel--the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It's a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. Catherynne M. Valente
About This Quote

A test was created to determine whether computers were capable of having a conversation. The question was: "Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine?" The problem with this test is that it is almost entirely dependent on the observer and their feelings of intelligence. For example, if someone answered yes to this question, you could ask them if they would like to see the results of this test and they would always say no. If they answered no, then you knew they felt that the computer was intelligent. How do you know what intelligent means?

Source: Silently And Very Fast

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