Let us imagine a world where it is impossible to distinguish between a human and a machine. Is this imagination even possible? If yes, How would such a world function? Will machines rule over mankind? And many more such questions might be striking your brain at the moment but before that, there is something you need to understand “what makes us different from a machine?” Well, it is our ability to “think”.
And this was the central argument put forward by the computer science pioneer Alan Turing in 1950 in his paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” which asks “Can machines think?” Turing did not just propose the question but he also attempted to find an answer by suggesting a simple test that is presently known as the “Turing test”. It is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior identical to, or not differentiable from, that of a human being. In simple words, a machine is supposed to mimic a human to pass this test. During the test, there are three players say A, B, and C. Here player C, the interrogator, has the task of trying to determine which of the player – A or B – is a human and which is a machine. And if the interrogator misidentifies the machine as a human then the machine passes the Turing test.
In the current scenario, we have seen several pieces of AI software that have beaten the Turing test. And as we’re entering the age of artificial intelligence where AI programs are getting better and better at mimicking humans, there will always be a question of whether there’s really anything that makes human intelligence special, or are we just machines of a different kind?
In the future, after passing the Turing test, let us consider all the machines will exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to a human; thus, it becomes impossible to distinguish between a machine from a human. In that case, all the work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines without the requirement of human beings.
The emotions produced in a human’s body due to chemical reactions can be converted into respective algorithms and fed into a machine resulting in a robot with emotions, feelings, and intelligence. So after 50 years from now, the girl you chat with till late at night might actually be a machine that is capable of understanding you at an emotional level. The secretary you have hired may not necessarily be a human because a machine with a human level of intelligence can handle your finances much better. So, the day is not far when machines would not just mimic humans but will eventually replace them.
Let’s take an example of the recently launched ChatGPT, an AI tool that everybody’s talking about. It can pretty much do everything beyond what we imagined a BOT was capable of doing. It is smart enough to not just understand and process human language but it produces human-like responses. If it didn’t mention that it was “an artificial intelligence language model created by OpenAI” after every tricky question we asked to confirm its identity, we would have hardly recognized him as a bot.
Before chatGPT, Every time we came across a difficult problem, the first thing we did was google it. From business strategies to relationship advice, we have faith in google because somewhere we are sure that it can give us better suggestions. But ChatGPT has changed everything, It often comes with the most optimized solutions for any problem. We are slowly losing the ability to think ourselves because such tools have made all kinds of information readily available to us and we no more need to memorize anything. Forget about memorizing, we don’t even feel the necessity of understanding anything. This dependency on technology is just a small picture of what the future holds. (We will be talking in depth about ChatGPT in the next blog.)
It might be argued that the human race will be wise enough to not hand over all their power to machines. Yes, the human race would never voluntarily turn power over to the machines, and the machines won’t willfully seize it (I doubt a little, just watched M3GAN a couple of days ago). What I am trying to suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to be in such a position of dependency on machines that it would prefer to accept all of the machines’ decisions.
With problems faced by societies becoming more and more complex, machines have become more and more intelligent. People are willing to let machines make more of their decisions merely because machine-made decisions will yield better results.
To sum up, passing the Turing test might pave a positive path for the progress of the world by enhancing the economy, making life easier, etc. whereas, there is a possibility of it leading to the replacement of humans from their respective jobs. However, I strongly believe that the use of technology is in our hands and as the future is unpredictable, the results after passing the Turing test remain unpredictable too. (A safe ending …. Tadaaa)
References
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9243806
http://genconnection.com/English/ap/theodore_kaczynski.htm
https://theconversation.com/turing-test-why-it-still-matters-123468
Wonderful article Priyanshu! Keep it up!