The World in 2030

The World in 2030 77
continue doing so as long as there is a competitive
pressure and profits to be made. People want better
computers and smarter software, and they want the
benefits these machines can help produce. Better
medical drugs; relief for humans from the need to perform
boring or dangerous jobs; entertainment – there
is no end to the list of consumer-benefits. There is
also a strong military motive to develop artificial intelligence.
And nowhere on our path is there any natural
stopping point where technophobics could plausibly
argue ‘hither but not further’. 144
But how will we know when computers of the future become
as intelligent as humans? At this stage it is necessary to explain
the ‘Turing Test’. Alan Turing 145 was a British mathematician
who, while studying at Cambridge, published a paper called
‘On Computable Numbers’ 146 in 1936. This paper laid the
foundations for modern computer science and explicitly
described a theoretical machine that we would today call a
computer.
During World War II, Alan Turing built the world’s first
computer to enable the British government to decode Nazi
and Japanese encrypted communications and, in 1950,
he published a paper called Computing Machinery and
Intelligence 147 in which he described a test that could be
used to determine when a computer’s intelligence came to
equal human intelligence.
Now known as the Turing Test 148 the evaluation method
involves a human talking to a machine (via a keyboard in
Turing’s original vision) and holding a complex conversation.