The Turing test is necessary to determine a program’s ability to think. This empirical test is conducted with two people and a program, in which the program and one person communicate with a judge. The judge needs to determine which of his interlocutors is a robot and which is a human, with the dialogue taking place only in typed form and the response time remaining the same so that the judge cannot relate it to the program’s computational ability.
The Turing test once attracted public attention because people were frightened by the idea that they could not even tell the difference between a robot and a human. While in the beginning, machines took longer to answer than humans, modern machines, on the contrary, create an answer faster, which is also interesting in the study of this topic. However, an essential advantage of the test is that communication is not limited to topics. The judge can ask and receive answers on any topic, which expands the possibilities of the test. However, the problem with the test is understanding a person’s mind and behavior.
Often, people behave irrationally and give illogical answers, complicating the test and affecting its validity. From this exact problem comes another – the inability to determine whether a machine is trying to imitate human behavior mindlessly or whether it can think for itself. Thus, the test cannot determine whether the machine can think but only determines how accurately it can imitate human behavior, which generally carries less scientific value. In most fields of human endeavor where artificial intelligence is necessary, there is no need to copy the behavior of other beings accurately. Just as airplane designers do not aim to copy birds’ flight patterns and behavior, artificial intelligence rarely needs to give the impression of a natural person. Here the question of whether artificial intelligence can think for itself is more global, but it cannot be answered with complete certainty after passing the Turing test.
Thus, the development of artificial intelligence is once again forcing humanity to consider the question of the existence of a free will. Answering this question has the potential to expand human knowledge about the nature of the mind, as well as to change many of society’s principles. The answer to this question can be obtained after the emergence of independently thinking programs. Still, despite the advantages of the Turing test, it does not provide a reliable answer to this question.