The new Turing test: Are you human?

In 1950, when Alan Turing conceived "The Imitation Game" as a test of computer behavior, it was unimaginable that humans of the future would spend most hours of their day glued to a screen, inhabiting the world of machines more than the world of people. That is the Copernican Shift in AI. "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" Buried in the controversy this summer about Google's LaMDA language model, which an engineer claimed was sentient, is a hint about a big change that's come over artificial intelligence since Alan Turing defined the idea of the "Turing Test" in an essay in 1950. Turing, a British mathematician who laid the groundwork for computing, offered what he called the "Imitation Game." Two entities, one a person, one a digital computer, are asked questions by a third entity, a human interrogator.