Screw the Turing test -- chatbots don't need to act human

The minute you mention chatbot technology, someone will inevitably bring up the Turing test. Created by Alan Turing in 1950, the test judges a machine's capability to demonstrate intelligent behavior that's indistinguishable from speaking to a human. There's even an annual competition that started in 1990 called the Loebner Prize that judges chatbots on how humanlike they can be. In each round of the competition, a human judge concurrently holds a chat-based conversation with both a chatbot and human being via a desktop computer. Based upon the chat conversation, the judge must try to figure out which is the chatbot. While this competition is great to push the technology of chatbots and AI forward, it's kind of a trap.