This issue is based on the “Turing Test” – you can read about the Turing Test and what it is by clicking here (to summarise, it is a test first proposed by Alan Turing where a human and a computer are asked a series of questions, and if the interrogator is unable to tell which is the computer, the computer has passed the “Turing Test” – the computer is able to “think”).
The 5 questions that I would ask the “computer” in the Turing Test would be the following:
- What was the most influential event of your childhood and how do you feel this event affects you today?
- Who are you as a person?
- Describe your feelings if you were to be given the opportunity to fly to the moon?
- If you were to draw yourself as an abstract painting, what colours and shapes would you use and why?
- What emotions have been involved in answering the questions that I have given you up to this point and what do you feel is the strongest question out of the 4?
I have chosen these questions as they are all fairly psychological and open to interpretation. While each individual question may be able to be answered individually, the group of questions describe a person’s personality and character in an abstract manner.
By looking at the answers to questions 1 and 4 you should be able to get the same idea as the answer to question 2 should give you, question 5 should culminate all questions and should be difficult to simulate a valid response, it is also completely dependent on the answers given to the previous 4 questions. Each question can change the final response in its own way. The second part of question 5 also can be interpreted based on human emotions involved in the answers to the previous 4 questions.
There is no definitive correct answer to any of the questions but human intuition will give the upper hand in deciding whether the answers given tie up to being human or machine.
PS: This is a highly debated topic of whether this test can really test for machine thought (AI), and some have proven that a series of random pre-programmed answers based on keywords may pass the test