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I'm generally in agreement with you (I upvoted your comment), but think it's important not to distort--even unintentionally--the motivations, speech, or work of historical figures like Alan Turing.

"I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'"

(Paraphrasing from the Wikipedia entry[1][2]) Turing reckons with the problem of formally defining "thought", so instead chooses to reframe the question, and invent an experiment that uses more specific, well-defined conditions and thresholds, arguing that this would be more likely to produce a concrete answer. This experiment is, of course, what he called the "Imitation Game", and having laid out its rules and conditions, he posed, "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?"

He then spends a large portion of the rest of the paper to address nine ostensible objections to the notion that machines could "think".

All that said, there's plenty of room to debate whether or not Turing's experiment is/isn't flawed, whether subjective interpretations of a purely language-driven interaction is a valid model for "thinking" more broadly, and whether these ideas can/should be applied to contemporary technology. I personally think that Turing's experiment should simply be accepted for what it is, rather than being wielded dogmatically[3]--it's an exceptionally insightful contribution to a wider body of human knowledge and philosophy, but insufficient for establishing anything like "sentience" in machines.

1. It is insane that the original paper is behind a paywall.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

3. As I have seen frequently elsewhere, I am not suggesting the parent comment is doing so.



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