Kevin Warwick

**This book was reviewed for the San Francisco and Seattle Book Reviews**

Rather than being a book about Turing the man, Warwick and Shah focus specifically on Turing's famous Imitation Game, a tool for judging artificial intelligence, or rather, can a given machine 'think’? This game asks the question 'can a hidden machine fool a human into thinking they were having a conversation with another human?’

Turing’s Imitation Game is divided into several sections. The first looks at Turing the man, but it is a brief overview only interested in the parts of his life relevant to the invention of the Game. Beyond that, Part One is mostly an overview of history, with sections on Turing's ideas in regards to thinking machines, a brief history of AI, controversy over the Imitation Game, a history of 'conversation systems’, and questions raised by early Turing tests. Part Two focuses on recent practical tests, from 2008-2014, with interviews with machine developers, and a section on what the future may hold for AI.

I'm not necessarily interested in robotics or cybernetics. I'm a philosopher interested in questions of sentience. The endeavour to create 'artificial’ intelligence that can grow, learn, and adapt on its own, that can fool humans, does beg the question 'at what point does sentience emerge?’ Turing's Imitation Game is one step in the process, and so it fascinates me. It is by no means a test for human-like intelligence in machines. No, that is a step and a question much further down the road. The question Turing asked was 'can machines think?' It's interesting that the criteria used is the ability to communicate, which means, to pass the Turing test, a machine needs to be able to process and *understand* language well enough to fool a human.

Reading the transcripts from some of the Turing tests is quite amusing. Some are just bizarre. Some come across like toddlers, learning to share conversation and take turns speaking, but each participant (machine and human) is having a different. The 2014 tests recorded a success. The Turing test had been passed. This set of tests had been carried out by the authors, using five different virtual 'bots, several of which had been part of previous rounds of testing and improved upon. The authors suggest that the test parameters be expanded to twenty-five minutes now that the five minute parameter has been breached. Their suggestion of a future with 'Terminator’ tests, where the machines will have evolved to human appearance as well reminded me more of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Measure of a Man’, where Data, the Enterprise's android officer is recalled for study, and the Enterprise crew calls for a tribunal to determine his sentience.

This book at times slowed me down with the technical language, but overall it was a very enlightening read.

📚📚📚📚 Recommended for those interested in Turing, his Imitation Game, and the future of AI… (més)

The author is Professor of Cybernetics at Reading University. He is therefore constantly occupied with artificial intelligence, robots and cybernetics. He even has a chip in his left arm and has written various books. The best known is "March of the Machines", in which he specifically writes about the intelligence of machines/robots.

In "QI" he mentions a lot of aspects that have to do with intelligence. To name but a few: the IQ-test (how they came about and their use), how to define intelligence, conscience, intelligence in humans, animals and robots/machines and comparisons of all these subjects.

What is special abut this man is that he believes many machines/robots are already more intelligent than humans. Or, as he puts it, they can do certain things better than humans. He also states there is no single definition of intelligence and he questions the most widely used parameters.

It's a very easy read and only a little over 200 pages. Well worth it!… (més)