Arguments Against The Turing Test

Introduction (22 words) I am going to argue that Turing is wrong to state that passing the Turing test is sufficient to be considered intelligent.

Exposition (470 words) Turing's basic argument is that it is meaningless to consider to consider the question "Can machines think" in an abstract sense and that it would be almost impossible to quantify what that question even means. He proposes to break down this argument into a simpler form, which seems to be along the lines of "Can a machine imitate a human well enough to be mistaken for a human?" He calls this argument "the imitation game" which is a fairly self explanatory name. Turing believes one of the main issues is that most people approach machines with an inbuilt bias that humans are

There are numerous arguments for why this would not be true. Humans have no standardized methodology when it comes to answering questions. This might be seen as a negative in terms of a computer's ability to answer as a human would, but humans talk in non sequiturs all the time. The human "train of thought" is followed by such fuzzy logic that a question such as "What do you think about today's weather" might lead to a response like "I could really use a Nathan's hot dog from Coney Island right now." If a human answered the question like that, the one asking the question would simply think "He must think the weather is great and want to go to Coney Island, and has good memories of Nathan's." The one asking the question would not think, "What kind of response is that? Is he even human?" The Turing Test seems to have two inherent limitations on its effectiveness, the imagination of the programmer and the imagination of the one asking the questions. If we want to consider "stumping" someone with a question that they would not be able to answer to be our condition for discerning the difference between a machine and a human, then humans would fail to be considered a human all the time. Standard questions such as "Do you know what love is" or "How does happiness feel like" would also elicit a babble of words from most humans since most humans have an inability to put their feelings into words. If someone responded to "How do you feel when you're in love" with "I feel a flush, an increased heart rate, slight dizziness, and my pupils dilating," would you consider that person to be a machine or just a biologist with a very literal personality? The comparisons between human and machines are also very rarely done under similar circumstances. When we envision a human participating in any test or comparison with a machine, we probably picture an average male or female, probably at