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If a machine were to 'take the Fifth Amendment' -- that is, exercise the right to remain silent throughout the test -- it could, potentially, pass the test and thus be regarded as a thinking entity, authors Kevin Warwick and Huma Shah of Coventry University argue. However, if this is the case, any silent entity could pass the test, even if it were clearly incapable of thought.
The test, devised in 1950 by pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, assesses a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human. Also known as the 'imitation game', it requires a human judge to converse with two hidden entities, a human and a machine, and then determine which is which.
Warwick and Shah's study looks at transcripts of a number of conversations from actual Turing tests in which the hidden machine remained silent. In each case, the human judge was unable to say for certain whether they were interacting with a person or a machine.
Thus, a machine could potentially pass the Turing test simply by remaining silent. The judge would be unable to determine whether the silent entity was a human choosing not to answer the questions, a smart machine that had decided not to reply, or a machine experiencing technical problems that prevented it from answering (as was actually the case in the transcripts studied).
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Journal Reference:
- Kevin Warwick, Huma Shah. Taking the fifth amendment in Turing’s imitation game. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 2016; 1 DOI: 10.1080/0952813X.2015.1132273
