Kurzweil gets a lot of flack for this sort of thing, he's generally presented as the ridiculous hype man for AI. And yet, he bet in 2002 that an AI would pass the Turing test by 2029. (And this is actually a more conservative prediction than "we will have AGI by 2029.") And looking at GPT3 it seems like he is probably going to win that bet.
I think the big revolution of the last few years has been to recognize that we'll likely get robots that can pass the turing test well before we get full self driving vehicles that can run anywhere there are basically ordinary paved roads.
I think even three years ago, most people would have thought the reverse.
So Kurzweil was imagining the turing test as the capstone to a decade of more and more capable ai products, not as "kind of early interesting success that may (or may not) presage really useful AI."
("The Turing test" is a pretty hazy target. I have no doubt that a chatgpt that was not trained to loudly announce that it was an AI could convince lots of people that it's a real human, right now. I think it's also the case that people with some experience with it could pretty quickly find ways to tell what it is.)
The Turing test has always been hazy - I don't think it's something we'll consider "passed" until at least a clear majority consider it passed (if not substantially further).
Otherwise you risk claiming ELIZA passed it, because a couple people thought so. Or that one Google employee this time.
Yes, that's what I was trying to say in the last paragraph. The Turing Test was an interesting thought experiment, not, like, an actual test. It's never been very clear how to operationalize it, and it's clear that Turing wasn't imagining how easily you can actively fool people. He was more making a point that we don't have an internal definition of intelligence -- it's not like multiplication where you can examine the underlying process and say, "Well, did it do this correctly?" You can only look at the results.
Good point, I do appreciate this comment. Thanks for adding this. It is is interesting in how it very much appears that he will be correct, but instead in a different way maybe than most of us would reasonably have guessed at the time.
