The Turing Test

What makes us human? This workshop draws inspiration from Alan Turing’s 1950 essay on machine intelligence, in which a subject is given the task of asking questions to a human and machine and determining which is the machine. Students divide into groups and devise their own set of questions intended to bring out the “human”, and then trade questions with other groups. Two members of each group remotely answer the questions, with one acting as a machine by only using answers from online bots or search engines, and one acting as genuinely human. The “questioner” has to decide which of the two is machine and which is human.