Revisiting the Turing Test: Humans, Machines, and Phraseology

Abstract

A re-reading of the Turing Test is developed and applied to contemporary challenges facing “nudging” and AI. Turing’s 1936 analysis of computation is reviewed in light of its resonance with Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books; current objections to the Turing Test (including Searle’s Chinese Room) are answered; and Turing’s Test for “intelligent machinery” is construed as a social experiment between humans in the face of emerging technology. The significance of what Wolfram has called “computational irreducibility” and what Wittgenstein called the need for “surveyability” of algorithms are stressed and then placed beside contemporary concerns about nudging, algorithms and Artificial Intelligence as these are applied with increasing precision and ubiquity in everyday life. Concerns about privacy, surveillance, informatics domination, lack of explicability of decision-making, biases, ethics, and unequal negative impacts on populations are discussed in light of these concepts. Turing’s prescient idea, that it is human beings who bear responsibility for meaningful public discussion of the sorting, typing and design of algorithms, is defended as something more than what Kahnemann, Sibony and Sunstein have recently denigrated as mere “noise”.