Imitation games: Turing, Menard, Van Meegeren

  • Authors:

  • Brian P. Bloomfield;Theo Vurdubakis

  • Affiliations:

  • Centre for the Study of Technology and Organisation, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YX (E-mail: brian.bloomfield@lancaster.ac.uk);Manchester School of Management, UMIST, P.O. Box 88, Manchester M60 1QD (E-mail: t.vurdubakis@umist.ac.uk)

  • Venue:
  • Ethics and Information Technology
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

For many, the very idea of an artificialintelligence has always been ethicallytroublesome. The putative ability of machinesto mimic human intelligence appears to callinto question the stability of taken forgranted boundaries between subject/object,identity/similarity, free will/determinism,reality/simulation, etc. The artificiallyintelligent object thus appears to threaten thehuman subject with displacement and redundancy.This article takes as its starting point AlanTuring's famous `imitation game,' (the socalled `Turing Test'), here treated as aparable of the encounter between human originaland machine copy – the born and the made. Thecultural resonances of the recent on-lineperformance of a `Turing Test' for computergenerated art are then explored. Arttraditionally taken to stand for all that isconsidered quintessentially human – andtherefore resistant to mechanisation –represents in this sense a kind of `criticalcase' in the advance of machine intelligence.The article focuses on the moral status of thebody, human agency, and social knowledge in theongoing (re-)constructions of copy, original,and of the difference between them.