Today’s best artificial intelligence (AI) models sail through the Turing test, a famous thought experiment that asks whether a computer can pass as a human by interacting via text.
Some see an upgraded test as a necessary benchmark for progress towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) — an ambiguous term used by many technology firms to mean an AI system with the resourcefulness to match any human cognitive ability. But at an event at London’s Royal Society on 2 October, several researchers said that the Turing test should be scrapped altogether, and that developers should instead focus on evaluating AI safety and building specific capabilities that could be of benefit to the public.
“Let’s figure out the kind of AI we want, and test for those things instead,” said Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. In focusing on “this march towards AGI, I think we’re really limiting our imaginations about what kind of systems we might want — and, more importantly, what kinds of systems we really don’t want — in our society”.
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