Not enough people realize that the "Turing Test" as originally presented was "can a gay English man in 1945 tell the difference between a chatbot and a femme-coded woman" over a teletype connection.
(Turing was very gay and had a sex-segregated education and then work life: he basically didn't know women and his alienation is palpable. But today's techbros don't have any such excuse, and the emphasis on femme-coded AI is ... telling.) https://mastodon.xyz/@pmorinerie/112506480363973206
@cstross I think it's also important to remember that he came up with it when the number of computers in the world was like, two? He didn't have the massive amount of experience we do with computers pretending to be humans.
@foone Oh, absolutely! The reason that paper is seminal is because it was probably the very first time the general public had been exposed to the idea of thinking machines as anything other than a plot motor in pulp SF or satire. (Robots, as envisaged in fiction in the 1920s-1940s, don't really count: they're the Tin Man from Oz with added thermionic valves and homicidal tendencies. Actually-existing computers were indeed something new.)
@foone So now I'm wondering what's the moder scientific answer to “How do you tell if this machine is thinking?”, or explorations of that question in modern science fiction.
(Yes I know that question has lots of “What do you mean by “thinking”?”, which is half the fun issue)