Computer pioneer Alan Turing’s remarks in 1950 on the question, “Can machines think?” were misquoted, misinterpreted and morphed into the so-called “Turing Test”. The modern version says if you can’t tell the difference between communicating with a machine and a human, the machine is intelligent. What Turing actually said was that by the year 2000 people would be using words like “thinking” and “intelligent” to describe computers, because interacting with them would be so similar to interacting with people. Computer scientists do not sit down and say alrighty, let’s put this new software to the Turing Test - by Grabthar’s Hammer, it passed! We’ve achieved Artificial Intelligence!
Ran across this comment while revisiting my old posts. I never heard of the Chinese room argument about machine intelligence, but I think there’s a much simpler test. If you come across a very intelligent statement carved into a stone wall, it probably doesn’t mean the wall is intelligent, based on what we know about stone. It doesn’t mean whoever carved it was intelligent, because a highly skilled carver could carve somebody else’s words without being very smart. Likewise, computer output that seems intelligent can’t be taken by itself as proof of anything.