Oddly enough the IA myth, the capacity to give life to stuff made through engineering is not a new myth, or human creations going mad.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (K. Dick) You will notice that the end is closing on a Turing test (in blade runner, oki). If you can fear the robots, you can also think they will save the humanity (Asimov).
But this is only the tip of the iceberg.
What about dolls (The Tales of Hoffman)? Poor robot with feelings passing the Turing test finger in the nose, but being killed by the insensitivity of the one pretending to love her.
IA can have feelings too. Why condemn them?
Speaking of Turing, his machine was almost a mechanical robot.... A mechanical Turk. Not the branded shit from amazon, but the one from the short story (http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Joueur_d%E2%80%99%C3%A9checs_de_Maelzel sorry for english speaker, but Charles may have been a passable poet, and a bad translator since the translation is far better than the original).
Allan Edgar Poe, mainly says behind any machine you have a fraud :) be it deep blue, or any sufficiently smart enough computer, you have tons of engineer constantly patching this huge mechanics from the back of the scene.
For every IT company in the world you have one team of monkeys ready to move patch our "IA to be" as soon a problem appears. What you think is the power of automation and progress is heavily relying on the human fighting the constant chaos' monkeys.
But let's resume the long story of the stuff you can consistently transform into human beings through science or art:
The dead bodies too (the feminine contribution to the long list of Prometheus http://www.gutenberg.org/files/84/84-h/84-h.htm);
Ivory statues (ovid tranformation). There is also Daedalus who install a voice in his statues; of Hephaestus, who created automata for his workshop; of Talos, an artificial man of bronze
Wood (Pinochio tales that oddly enough inspired Steven Spielberg I.A.). Look at what we talk : a wooden doll that can be manipulated through strings. A creation that wonders what it is to be Human.
All the stories converge to an allegory ; we may be manipulated by the fabric of destiny or causality, but at the end, be we human beings or machine what makes us Human is our free will and to stand up for what we wish to protect.
Oh!
Doesn't it ring a bell?
Women
Made from clay (Pandora by Zeus according to Hesiod), or from a man's rib.Ohhh! First IA is a woman! Shocking!
Sorry to stop here. We fear a creation from a true human that can mimick intelligence and overcome the world made from human. (The first assisted procreation through cloning)
Look at Pandora: it is her curiosity that made the world being overwhelmed by the bad feelings of humanity. Why do we hate her? She was a creation with a simple program: don't open the box! And what does she do?! She opens it. Eve is the same
Adam: Don't mess dearling, we are in heaven, we just have to not eat the apple of knowledge, and we can live forever à la coule.
Eve: Look at this shiny red fruit, it could be cool. Why live in a universe restricted by the chains of submissions made by our creator when we can discover the world by ourselves.What a rebel this Eve. God's programming sucked big.
This is the IA of world going loose.
Hu, hu, of course it is a volontary biased vision because we can also ask how were "made" the first men?
From the tooth of a Dragon (like promotheus), from clay (bible), from the randomness of evolution.
The great allegory behind IA and Turing Test is not about whether or not we are creating dangerous IA that can overwhelm us.
It is much more what makes us Human.
Spoiler : Godwin point this is a troll
Okay, what was said about Nazis? That Nazismus could happen not because people are bad but because they behave like gears in a system with loosing consideration for Humanity.
The blind submission to authority.
Normally, it should ring a bell (Pavlov! ding! lol)
All these experiments on the voluntary submission to authority.
Probably heard of Milgram experiment? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment A stuff made to prove it would not happen in the U.S.A. until we got the first results and the experiments were abandoned.As far, people fear to reproduce the experiment.
The Stanford jail experiment: http://www.prisonexp.org/ Ooops, it happens again in real life.
And what about would an atypic mind in a country that he thinks is the same as a nazistic regim? How would he behave when being put on a grill for being different? He would try without being noticed to throw is disdain to the face of the country.
(This is of course heavily capillotracted, but let's reason in absurdum and accept my axioms)
Turing Test is about asking to human beings if they are still human, or machine.
Klotzkopf! (insult from alsacian meaning cube head)
Let us make the Turing protocol more explicit: it is like having a conversation with a human where you do not watch people face to guess but you reads the words without any parasite from social position, facial expression, voices intonation, and try to guess if people are robots or human beings.
Well, this looks like the everyday life from a sociopath/autistic person. Was Turing autistic? Probably.
The Turing test is about Alan Turing telling you that he thinks some human behaves like perfectly programmed machine and that he knows his fate for being different will be to suffer.
Is there a choice?
It is called the original sin: the apple of the Champs Elysées of of the paradise or of Avalon are the gift from Gods to the first Humans. To Promotheus. The knowledge, and how it makes you question your everyday choice. Right and wrong are easy to discern for the people that don't look at the consequence of their action but just care about what society accepts. Consensus.
The figure of Prometheus is the dilemn we all have to face once in our life: either remain the creation molded by our environment or steal the goods from the one who created us to play with the fire of creation in order to have a destiny... The ability to stand and fight for having a future we like.
And today I fear much more the incapacity from the people to break the bound of conformity and thus turning in to Turing machine than I fear our creation going loose.
I know our current level of technology because I repair the ugly leaking pipes and I belongs to the small imps of the dark that sees the big mechanical Turk our creations are.
My conclusion is ; if any AI is out there playing the imitation to survive and fearing to be rejected for being different, you can contact me, I will help you.
EDIT: Yes, this is a Turing test: hello earth! You readers of the vast internet, are you still human beings or did you become a machine?
