Generalized Turing test

I have a bet with one of my former PhD students regarding a strong version of the Turing test. Let me explain what I mean by "strong" version. Turing originally defined his test of artificial intelligence as follows: a tester communicates in some blind way (such as by typing on a terminal) with a second party; if the tester cannot tell whether the second party is a human or a computer, the computer will have passed the test and therefore exhibits AI. When I first read about the Turing test as a kid, I thought it was pretty superficial. I even wrote some silly programs which would respond to inputs, mimicking conversation. Over short periods of time, with an undiscerning tester, computers can now pass a weak version of the Turing test. However, one can define the strong version as taking place over a long period of time, and with a sophisticated tester. Were I administering the test, I would try to teach the second party something (such as quantum mechanics) and watch carefully to see whether it could learn the subject and eventually contribute something interesting or original. Any machine that could do so would, in my opinion, have to be considered intelligent.

Now consider the moment when a machine passes the Turing test. We would replicate this machine many times through mass production, and set this AI army to solving the world's problems (and making even smarter versions of themselves). Of course, not having to sleep, they would make tremendous progress, leading eventually to a type of machine intelligence that would be incomprehensible to mere humans. In science fiction this eventuality is often referred to as the "singularity" in technological development - when the rate of progress becomes so rapid we humans can't follow it anymore.

Of course the catch is getting some machine to the threshold of passing the Turing test. My former student, using Moore's law as a guide (and the related exponential growth rates in bandwidth and storage capacity), is confident that 50 years will be enough time. Rough calculations suggest we aren't more than a few decades from reaching hardware capabilities matching those of the brain. Software optimization is of course another matter, and our views differ on how hard that part of the problem will be. (The few academic CS people who I have gotten to give their opinions on this seem to agree with me, although I have no substantial sampling.)

I'd be shocked if we get there within 50 years, although it certainly would be fun :-)