What does the Turing Test test?

Saw the movie Ex Machina. The outside shots, filmed in Valldalen, Norway, are are simply gorgeous. Good flick and provoked some ruminating (avoiding plot details).

There seems no a priori reason to suppose that machine intelligence cannot reach the point of passing the Turing test. A complex enough programed machine able to “learn” from extracting patterns from massive data and using them to interact with humans should be able to “exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.” One can imagine such a machine as pictured in the movie.

But what does the Turing test really test. An “artificial intelligence” might be able to interpret and respond to the full range of human behavior and simulate the same. It might be able to “read” a conscious human better than an actual human might by picking up on subtle physical manifestations (as stored in its memory). With a large enough data base behind it and a multitude of “learned” behaviors it might convince a human that it was indeed intelligent and even self-aware. But would it be? Would the ability to simulate human behavior completely enough to appear human actually be human or entail consciousness? If programed with a sub-routine causing it to seek to persist (i.e., resist termination), would it be a self seeking self-preservation? Would programing allowing it to read human emotions and respond “appropriately” with simulated emotion mean it actually felt such emotions?

Would a machine intelligence able to simulate human behavior and emotions actually be able to love, hate, feel empathy and act with an awareness of itself and, perhaps more importantly, of an Other? Or might there still be something missing?

Smoked a cigar on my favorite bench while considering all this and watched some ants going about their business. Ants are extremely complex biological machines acting and reacting within their environment with purpose and an overall drive to self-perpetuate (both as individuals and as a collective). They may be conscious even if not self aware. Or is a certain basic self-awareness something that goes with being alive? Would even a very complex machine ever be alive even if very “intelligent?”

My guess is that machine intelligence – even if very complex and advanced and equipped with a self-referential sub-program allowing algorithmic analysis of itself – would not be conscious or alive. Thus not capable of emotion and therefore what we might call coldly rational. Is this why Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and others are concerned about AI?

Will the Coming Turing Machines Have Soul?

By now, most everyone probably has heard of Alan Turing.  He played a lead role in breaking Nazi codes during WWII and contributed to the conceptual framework behind modern computers.  He also devised the Turing Test, a way to decide the question of whether an electronic machine might be able to think.  A machine might be said to pass the test if through a series of written questions and answers through a blind channel, a human would think that he or she was communicating with another human being.  This has set the standard for much of the debate over artificial intelligence. 

Machines that may pass the Turing Test are on the horizon.  Much is now being written about the development of machines that can learn and even read emotions -- affective computing -- by working through big data using sophisticated algorithms, running many iterations with pattern recognition. The machines essentially construct elaborate maps of patterns that emerge through analyzing huge sets of data by trying all paths but increasingly using the ones that lead to useful answers, a kind of binary evolution.  This form of machine "intelligence" is already being used on iPhones to determine what you might like to type, by Google to direct your search as you consider where to go and by the NSA to pick through the ever-expanding data haystacks for those "golden" needles.  Companies are eager to use affective computing to read your face, body language and physical state (via iWatch and other connected sensors) -- and therefore your emotions -- as you socialize and consume via the Web. 

All this also raises the very real possibility that soon, we might be able to talk with a robot able to read our verbal and non-verbal, internal and external information and convince us that even though we can see it is a machine, it is acting human.  It would pass a Turing Test squared.

Leaving aside the possibility that such machines might also be able to read us without our knowing, this raises the question of whether such machines would indeed be thinking actors perhaps deserving the attribution of being considered conscious.  Would a machine able to meet the Turing Test -- including by "understanding" what we say, how we feel and also being able to respond in a fully appropriate and meaningful way-- be alive?  Human?  Or to flip the question, are we, essentially, anything more than an evolutionarily elaborated biological device trained through life experience -- iterative learning -- and thus able ourselves to meet the Turing Test and nothing more?

Put more simply, can true understanding be reduced to even extremely complex patterns and decision algorithms stored and processed in massive memory?  Is a machine that "understands" in this way still just a very sophisticated hunk of metal or has some sort of "soul" been engendered in the complex workings of advanced electronics?  There are those who see consciousness as indeed just such an emergent property of the physical world.  The only other alternative seems to be some variant of the ghost in the machine.  Beyond this is perhaps the ultimate question of what exactly distinguishes life from non-life?  Can only things alive be said to truly think and feel?  Is it only a living creature that can be an agent with its own subjectivity?  I suspect so.  But the time may be coming for us to add to the Turing Test some way to measure that very property, which might also be called consciousness or just soul.