What Goostman’s victory really reveals, though, is not the advent of SkyNet or cyborg culture but rather the ease with which we can fool others. Here, for example, is how a slightly early version of the program responded last night when I asked about its reading habits: Unlike ELIZA, Goostman has a working grasp of grammar and a “personality,” engineered to fool judges into thinking he is a flippant adolescent. Goostman can maintain the illusion of human conversation for longer than ELIZA, and its lexicon expands beyond psychiatry and family conflict. Sooner or later, though, ELIZA would respond in ways that were ungrammatical, confusing, or just plain nonsense. Many users were too narcissistic (or at least too naïve) to realize that the person they were “talking” to via teletype, an ancestor to text messaging, was a computer. Users would type in their personal problems, and ELIZA, a crude simulation of a patient but nondirective therapist, would spit back responses-for example, “How does that make you feel about your family?”-without understanding the first thing about what the user had said.
It is not a groundbreaking, super-fast piece of innovative hardware but simply a cleverly-coded piece of software, heir to a program called ELIZA that was first developed-as a joke-in the nineteen-sixties.
Here’s what Eugene Goostman isn’t: a supercomputer. The considerable hype around the announcement-nearly every tech blog and newspaper reported on the story-ignored a more fundamental question: What, exactly, is Eugene Goostman, and what does “his” triumph over the Turing Test really mean for the future of A.I.?
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