Artifice and Intelligence

Starting today, the Privacy Center will stop using the terms "artificial intelligence," "AI," and "machine learning" in our work to expose and mitigate the harms of digital technologies in the lives of individuals and communities. I will try to explain what is at stake for us in this decision with reference to Alan Turing's foundational paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which is of course most famous for its description of what the paper itself calls "the imitation game," but what has come to be known popularly as "the Turing test." The imitation game involves two people (one of whom takes the role of the "interrogator") and a computer. The object is for the interrogator, physically separated from the other player and the computer, to try to discern through a series of questions which of the responses to those questions is produced by the other human and which by the computer. "…in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10⁹, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent, chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning."