Last month in New Zealand I visited some of the wizardly artists and engineers working for Weta Digital, the effects company behind series like “The Hobbit” and “Planet of the Apes.” That set me thinking about how we decide whether something has a mind.
You might not imagine that your local multiplex would be a font of philosophical insight. But the combination of Alan Turing ’s “imitation game” (the idea behind the new movie’s title) and the latest digital effects blockbusters speaks to deep questions about what it means to be human.
Turing, who helped to invent the modern computer, also proposed that the best test of whether a computer could think was the imitation game. Someone would sit at a keyboard interacting with either a computer or another human at the other end. If the person at the keyboard couldn’t tell the difference between the two, then you would have to accept that the computer had achieved human intelligence and had something like a human mind.
But suppose that, instead of sitting at a keyboard, you were looking at a face on a screen? That imitation-game test, it turns out, is much, much harder for a computer to pass.
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