Virtuosity

As reported last Sunday in the Guardian, Alan Turing's famous question, first posed in 1950, will once again be testing at 9am (GMT) this Sunday, October 12th at the University of Reading in the UK. Can machines think? If one of theses six ambitious AI challengers are able, and I highly doubt it, to fool a panel of human judges during 5 minutes of conversation it will certainly mark the dawn of a brave new world and the realization of Vernor Vinge's Singularity.

If however the challengers fail as expected this time around I wouldn't get too comfortable. Ray Kurzweil postulates in his 1999 book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" that we have until 2019 before "a $1000 computing device (in 1999 dollars) is approximately equal to the computational ability of the human brain." Once that becomes reality, can true machine intelligence be that far off?

In any case, let's hope John Connor and friends are keeping a close eye on this Sunday's outcome.