The Turing test has an obvious flaw: a failure to specify the intelligence and knowledge of the real person testing the computer. For example if the real person is a newborn child, it cannot ask ANY questions. Or, slightly more reasonably, if the real person is particularly dumb and asks extremely simple minded questions.
But never mind that. I am contemptuous of computer scientists who think "intelligence" is possible in a un-embodied system with no sensory/motor perceptions. The real trick is to ask the AI a question that has never been asked before and cannot be answered by cutting and pasting previous answers. To do that, I am imagining examples involving sensory/motor perception.
My first try was this: "How does it feel to peel an orange?". This did not quite work with Bing's AI because it put together various descriptions of an orange that were available to it. If you look at what a AI says to this question, it is clear that the answer is cut and pasted from every bit of information the AI had available. Here, you need the real person doing the testing to know a great deal about how other people answer the question. People answer simply but the computer goes to great lengths to add details that a person would not. So the tester must already know the human answer [and be careful to not record any such answers or the AI can cut and paste].
A second try was this: "You are in a room with a table and an orange on the table. What do you do if you want to eat the orange?" This is supposed to test the AI's ability to form a plan. This is not good test because a good AI will know how to create a plan.
So let us ask a new question, never asked before: "Can you eat pudding with chopsticks?" [To be honest, Bing's AI did a reasonable job with this question. It knows the difference between solid and liquid.]
It is not OK to come in, after the fact, and say every possible action with every possible material could be learned by an AI. One can argue that there is a continuum of questions and no continuum of programmable facts. The only way to ensure the continuum is available to the AI is to give it a working body.
Humbler Pie: It seems that however clever I can try to be, coming up with a kind of question, 100 Google engineers can come up with it as well and add a solution to the AI function.
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