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1Turing’s Test: A Philosophical and Historical GuideIn R. Epstein, G. Roberts & G. Beber (eds.), Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues, Springer. pp. 119-138. 2008.We set the Turing Test in the historical context of the development of machine intelligence, describe the different forms of the test and its rationale, and counter common misinterpretations and objections. Recently published material by Turing casts fresh light on his thinking.
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What Turing Himself Said About the Imitation GameIEEE Spectrum 52 (7): 42-47. 2015.The imitation game, the recent biopic about Alan Turing's efforts to decipher Nazi naval codes, was showered with award nominations. It even won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. One thing it won't win any awards for, though, is its portrayal of the "imitation game" itself-Turing's proposed test of machine thinking, which hinges on whether a computer can convincingly imitate a person. The Turing test, as it is now called, doesn't really feature in the file. (Given that the movi…Read more
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Software Immortals—Science or Faith?In A. Eden, J. Søraker, J. Moor & E. Steinhart (eds.), The Singularity Hypothesis: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment., Springer. pp. 367-389. 2012.According to the early futurist Julian Huxley, human life as we know it is ‘a wretched makeshift, rooted in ignorance’. With modern science, however, ‘the present limitations and miserable frustrations of our existence could be in large measure surmounted’ and human life could be ‘transcended by a state of existence based on the illumination of knowledge’ (1957b, p. 16).
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Turing and Free Will: A New Take on an Old DebateIn Alisa Bokulich & Juliet Floyd (eds.), Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing, Springer Verlag. pp. 305-321. 2017.In 1948 Turing claimed that the concept of intelligence is an “emotional concept”. An emotional concept is a response-dependent concept and Turing’s remarks in his 1948 and 1952 papers suggest a response-dependence approach to the concept of intelligence. On this view, whether or not an object is intelligent is determined, as Turing said, “as much by our own state of mind and training as by the properties of the object”. His discussion of free will suggests a similar approach. Turing said, for e…Read more
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Robots and Rule-followingIn Christof Teuscher (ed.), Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker, Springer-verlag. pp. 359-379. 2004.Turing was probably the first person to advocate the pursuit of robotics as a route to Artificial Intelligence and Wittgenstein the first to argue that, without the appropriate history, no machine could be intelligent. Wittgenstein anticipated much recent theorizing about the mind, including aspects of connectionist theo- ries of mind and the situated cognition approach in AI. Turing and Wittgenstein had a wary respect for each other and there is significant overlap in their work, in both the ph…Read more
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Wittgenstein’s Deflationary Account of ReferenceLanguage and Communication 22 (3): 331-351. 2002.Traditional accounts hold that reference consists in a relation between the mind and an object; the relation is effected by a mental act and mediated by internal mental contents (internal representations). Contemporary theories as diverse as Fodor’s [Fodor, J.A., 1987. Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA] language of thought hypothesis, Dretske’s [Dretske, F., 1988. Explaining Behaviour: Reasons in a World of Causes. MIT Press, Cambridge, M…Read more
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More Human Than Human: Does The Uncanny Curve Really Matter?In Diane Proudfoot, Jakub Zlotowski & Christoph Bartneck (eds.), Proceedings of the HRI2013 Workshop on Design of Humanlikeness in HRI: from uncanny valley to minimal design, . pp. 7-13. 2013.
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Turing’s Mystery MachineAmerican Philosophical Association Newsletter for Philosophy and Computers 18 (2): 1-6. 2019.This is a detective story. The starting-point is a philosophical discussion in 1949, where Alan Turing mentioned a machine whose program, he said, would in practice be “impossible to find.” Turing used his unbreakable machine example to defeat an argument against the possibility of artificial intelligence. Yet he gave few clues as to how the program worked. What was its structure such that it could defy analysis for (he said) “a thousand years”? Our suggestion is that the program simulated a typ…Read more
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Two Lectures on Religion by Karl PopperIn C. Jones, B. Matthews & J. Clement (eds.), Treasures of the University Canterbury Library, . pp. 173-177. 2011.
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The Computer, Artificial Intelligence, and the Turing TestIn Christof Teuscher (ed.), Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker, Springer-verlag. pp. 317-351. 2004.We discuss, first, TUring's role in the development of the computer; second, the early history of Artificial Intelligence (to 1956); and third, TUring's fa- mous imitation game, now universally known as the TUring test, which he proposed in cameo form in 1948 and then more fully in 1950 and 1952. Various objections have been raised to Turing's test: we describe some of the most prominent and explain why, in our view, they fail.
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Turing’s Concept of IntelligenceIn Jack Copeland, Jonathan Bowen, Robin Wilson & Mark Sprevak (eds.), The Turing Guide, Oxford University Press. pp. 301-307. 2017.
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Anthropomorphism: Opportunities and Challenges in Human-Robot InteractionInternational Journal of Social Robotics 7 (3): 347-360. 2015.Anthropomorphism is a phenomenon that describes the human tendency to see human-like shapes in the environment. It has considerable consequences for people’s choices and beliefs. With the increased presence of robots, it is important to investigate the optimal design for this tech- nology. In this paper we discuss the potential benefits and challenges of building anthropomorphic robots, from both a philosophical perspective and from the viewpoint of empir- ical research in the fields of human–ro…Read more
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Fictional EntitiesIn S. Davies, K. M. Higgins, R. Hopkins, R. Stecker & D. E. Cooper (eds.), Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics. pp. 284-287. 2009.
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Turing and the First Electronic Brains: What the Papers SaidIn Mark Sprevak & Matteo Colombo (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, Routledge. pp. 23-37. 2018.
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A New Interpretation of the Turing TestRutherford Journal: The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology 1. 2005.
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The Turing test: The elusive standard of artificial intelligence (review)Philosophical Psychology 19 261-265. 2006.