Artificial Intelligence: Friendly or Frightening?

Computer scientists, public figures and reporters have gathered to witness or take part in a decades-old challenge. Some of the participants are flesh and blood; others are silicon and binary. Thirty human judges sit down at computer terminals, and begin chatting. To determine whether they're talking to a computer program or a real person. The event, organized by the University of Reading, was a rendition of the so-called Turing test, developed 65 years ago by British mathematician and cryptographer Alan Turing as a way to assess whether a machine is capable of intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.