Animals, Zombanimals, and the Total Turing Test

  • Authors:

  • Selmer Bringsjord;Clarke Caporale;Ron Noel

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Cognitive Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590, U.S.A. E-mail: selmer@rpi.edu;Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Cognitive Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590, U.S.A. E-mail: caporc@prodigy.net;Department of Philosophy, Psychology, and Cognitive Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180-3590, U.S.A. E-mail: noelr@rpi.edu

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Logic, Language and Information
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

Alan Turing devised his famous test (TT) through a slight modificationof the parlor game in which a judge tries to ascertain the gender of twopeople who are only linguistically accessible. Stevan Harnad hasintroduced the Total TT, in which the judge can look at thecontestants in an attempt to determine which is a robot and which aperson. But what if we confront the judge with an animal, and arobot striving to pass for one, and then challenge him to peg which iswhich? Now we can index TTT to a particular animal and its syntheticcorrelate. We might therefore have TTTrat, TTTcat,TTTdog, and so on. These tests, as we explain herein, are abetter barometer of artificial intelligence (AI) than Turing's originalTT, because AI seems to have ammunition sufficient only to reach thelevel of artificial animal, not artificial person.