The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

In a paper published in 1950, the computer scientist Alan Turing suggested a legendary test for whether an AI exhibited human-level intelligence. When AI could display humanlike conversational abilities for a lengthy period of time, such that a human interlocutor couldn’t tell they were speaking to a machine, the test would be passed: the AI, conversationally akin to a human, deemed intelligent. For more than seven decades this simple test has been an inspiration for many young researchers entering the field of AI. Today, as the LaMDA-sentience saga illustrates, systems are already close to passing the Turing test. But, as many have pointed out, intelligence is about so much more than just language (or indeed any other single facet of intelligence taken in isolation). One particularly important dimension is in the ability to take actions. We don’t just care about what a machine can say; we also care about what it can do. What we would really like to know is, can I give an AI an ambiguous, open-ended, complex goal that requires interpretation, judgment, creativity, decision-making, and acting across multiple domains, over an extended time period, and then see the AI accomplish that goal? Put simply, passing a Modern Turing Test would involve something like the following: an AI being able to successfully act on the instruction “Go make $1 million on Amazon in a few months with just a $100,000 investment.” It might research the web to look at what’s trending, finding what’s h...

Show, Don’t Tell: The Modern Turing Test