Dorothy: How can you talk, if you haven't got a brain? The Scarecrow: I don't know. But, some people without brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they?

"According to the Turning Test, in order to determine whether a computer has a mind, you should communicate simultaneously with a computer and with a real person, without knowing which is which.  You can ask whatever questions you want, you can play games, argue, and even flirt with them.  Take as much time as you like.  Then you need to decide which is the computer and which is the human.  If you cannot make up your mind, or if you make a mistake, the computer has passed the Turing Test, and we should treat it as if it really has a mind.  However, that won't really be a proof, of course. Acknowledging the existence of other minds is merely a social and legal convention.


The Turing Test was invented in 1950 by the British mathematician Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the computer age.  Turing was also a gay man in a period when homosexuality was illegal in Britain.  In 1952 he was convicted of committing homosexual acts and forced to undergo chemical castration.  Two years later he committed suicide.  The Turing Test is simply a replication of a mundane test every gay man had to undergo in 1950s Britain: can you pass for a straight man?  Turing knew from personal experience that it didn't matter who you were really -- it mattered only what others thought about you.  According to Turing, in the future computers would be just like gay men in the 1950s.  It won't matter whether computers will actually be conscious or not.  It will only matter what people think about it."

Homo Deus
A Brief History of Tomorrow
Yuval Noah Harari