In Defence of a Reciprocal Turing Test
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In Defence of a Reciprocal Turing Test Fintan Mallory1 Received: 5 November 2019 / Accepted: 16 November 2020 / Published online: 7 December 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The traditional Turing test appeals to an interrogator’s judgement to determine whether or not their interlocutor is an intelligent agent. This paper argues that this kind of asymmetric experimental set-up is inappropriate for tracking a property such as intelligence because intelligence is grounded in part by symmetric relations of recognition between agents. In place, it proposes a reciprocal test which takes into account the judgments of both interrogators and competitors to determine if an agent is intelligent. This form of social interaction better tracks both the evolution of natural intelligence and how the concept of intelligence is actually used within our society. This new test is defended against the criticisms that a proof of intelligence requires a demonstration of self-consciousness and that semantic externalism entails that a non-embodied Turing test is inadequate. Keywords Turing test · Intelligence · Recognition · Externalism · Artificial intelligence The Turing test is taken to provide an indication of several things; whether a machine ‘thinks’, is ‘intelligent’ or possesses ‘a mind’. Turing never made much of an effort to distinguish between the different mental properties we might be interested in ascribing to machines and, in any case, these properties are typically taken to come as a package. To be intelligent is to be able to think, to have a mind, to be a concept-user, and so forth. Even if we take possession of these properties to be a gradient affair, it remains plausible that they are dependent on each other. In the following, I will use the word ‘intelligence’ as a catch-all term for these features. Critics of the test point out that intelligence also involves a myriad of abilities such as spatial reasoning, problem-solving, planning, self-awareness and so on, which the test does not directly engage with. If the test is supposed to provide an ‘operational definition’ of intelligence, it only seems to cover a small part of what intelligence really is. And if by ‘intelligence’, we simply mean ‘that property the * Fintan Mallory [email protected] 1
King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
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imitation game tests for’, then there’s little reason to think we’ve made progress when a machine has passed. This is the first problem which any discussion of the Turing test must address. Turing was aware that some people might take his test to simply change the subject.1 He acknowledged that the word ‘intelligence’ is equivocal and that there are many possible ways it could be precisified. Aside from the usual confusions that arise from calling products of intelligence ‘intelligent’ (e.g. moves in chess, books, computer programmes), we quite reasonably ascribe intelligence across the animal kingdom and beyond. There is certainly a sense in which my cat is intelligent
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