Page 50 - Foundations of Cognitive Psychology : Core Readings

48 Daniel C. Dennett

the way system designers must think. They are trained to think positively—
constructively, one might say—about the designs that they are constructing.
I come, then, to my conclusions. First, a philosophical or theoretical conclu-
sion:The Turing test in unadulterated, unrestricted form, as Turing presented
it, is plenty strong if well used. I am confident that no computer in the next
twenty years is going to pass an unrestricted Turing test. They may well win
the World Chess Championship or even a Nobel Prize in physics, but they
won’t pass the unrestricted Turing test. Nevertheless, it is not, I think, im-
possible in principle for a computer to pass the test, fair and square. I’m not
running one of those a priori ‘‘computers can’t think’’ arguments. I stand un-
abashedly ready, moreover, to declare that any computer that actually passes
the unrestricted Turing test will be, in every theoretically interesting sense, a
thinking thing.
But remembering how very strong the Turing test is, we must also recognize
that there may also be interesting varieties of thinking or intelligence that are
not well poised to play and win the imitation game. That no nonhuman Turing
test winners are yet visible on the horizon does not mean that there aren’t
machines that already exhibit some of the important features of thought. About
them,itisprobablyfutile to askmytitle question, Dotheythink?Dothey really
think? In some regards they do, and in some regards they don’t. Only a
detailedlook at what they do,and howtheyare structured,willrevealwhatis
interesting about them. The Turing test, not being a scientific test, is of scant
help on that task, but there are plenty of other ways of examining such systems.
Verdicts on their intelligence or capacity for thought or consciousness would be
only as informative and persuasive as the theories of intelligence or thought or
consciousness the verdicts are based on and since our task is to create such
theories, we should get on with it and leave the Big Verdict for another occa-
sion. In the meantime, should anyone want a surefire, almost-guaranteed-to-be-
fail-safe test of thinking by a computer, the Turing test will do very nicely.
My second conclusion is more practical, and hence in one clear sense more
important. Cheapened versions of the Turing test are everywhere in the air.
Turing’s test in not just effective, it is entirely natural—this is, after all, the way
we assay the intelligence of each other every day. And since incautious use of
such judgments and such tests is the norm, we are in some considerable danger
of extrapolating too easily, and judging too generously, about the understand-
ing of the systems we are using. The problem of overestimation of cognitive
prowess, of comprehension, of intelligence, is not, then, just a philosophical
problem, but a real social problem, and we should alert ourselves to it, and take
steps to avert it.

Postscript [1985]: Eyes, Ears, Hands, and History
My philosophical conclusion in this paper is that any computer that actually
passes the Turing test would be a thinking thing in every theoretically inter-
esting sense. This conclusion seems to some people to fly in the face of what I
have myself argued on other occasions. Peter Bieri, commenting on this paper
at Boston University, noted that I have often claimed to show the importance to