From the Turing-test to the Turing-relationship!

Some time ago, I was in Amorgos a very beautiful Greek island, where a friend was hosting me in her house. It was a bit outside of the port, in a very silent coastline on a hill over the sea. The house didn’t have a constant water supply, like there is in the cities, so it had it’s own water collection site for rain and mountain water, which they were pumping inside the house. The pumping system they had, was not operating in a constant pressure, but its pressure fluctuated in a sinusoidal manner making the shower (handle) move like a snake and the sound of filling toilet water container was similar to breathing.

In this really calm and joyful environment, this idea slipped into my mind:

"What is the distance of this movement or sound to a conception of inanimacy?"

How much or how random should it move or sound so we don’t necessarily frame it as an inanimate object. Then my answer came really fast:

"It's an animate object, but is at its best something that moves like a snake and that sounds like breathing".

This was the fate of technology for a long time. It took a lot of time to move from basic mechanical movement to constructed and contextual randomness. After all, machine learning is about finding, approximating or estimating a probability distribution. As we are now on its adolescent stage and behaviors of our most intelligent technologies start to become deeply complex and imaginative, I thought why don’t we frame the Turing test in different way than the traditional?

In it’s traditional form the Turing test was a blind folded test between two sources of input where secretly some of them had a human and some a machinic origin. The test was:

"Can we trick someone in believing that a machine was actually a human from a comparison that would happen on a given strata of data I/O".

Thus, in the jargon of Informatics a machine that passes a Turing test is a machine that can be confused with a human, so you can’t tell which is which.

A lot of people have criticized this through the ages (e.g. see the paper of François Chollet “On the Measure of Intelligence”) but my favorite one was that of Jaron Lanier, who noticed that the predecessor or the inspiration of the Turing test from Turing, was a game of the Victorian era with the same structure, where a woman instead of a robot was trying to fool a 3rd person of being a man. Lanier suggested, thus that Turing encoded in his test the origin a certain conservative ideological practice.

I would like to reframe this test in a way that is more familiar to my experience. An experience, that implies a need which is important and relevant only for this certain period of technology we are traversing, where the traditional Turing test is not anymore useful for making progress. Instead of trying to trick a third person from a real and a fake distribution, something that GANs already try to optimize, let’s imagine the Turing test more as a relationship of an individual towards another. The Turing relationship, can thus be measured (and tested) as a measure of use (satisfaction) and potential (surprise).

This is the feeling you have, when although having full knowledge of it’s machinic existence, the way it behaves and the results it produces, can induce feelings of animate poetry in an unconstrained (technical or not technical) amount of individualities. Even cats that play with electronic toys are sometimes bored of what these toys can do, but an AI toy would certainly surprise them and could also lead them to deep feelings. Even if our understanding of the animal is much more complex and hierarchical, more and more people get surprised knowing that an AI is speaking to them, while having a discussion with the chatbot of their bank, while waiting to check-in for a flight in an airport, somewhere. But this site and the feeling of the task-specific, make this technology appear much more like an instrumentalised tool, rather than a new type of being.

As so, embracing its existence in more and more different spaces, would create more and more the positive effect of not exactly a negative prejudice being reset, but more of a readjustment of a prejudice connected to a potential: the prejudice you have, when knowing that someone you didn’t know could cook, suddenly makes you a nice meal.

When working on the comic behind MangAI we constantly had the feeling of surprise. It felt to me like this comic was a poem of the world before it and that the world before it was a poem of this comic: the feeling of surprise that captivates you when wandering Twitter or when wandering the streets and process textual information that produces an aesthetic feeling of confusion, making you wonder “Is this synthetic?” This feeling should be decontextualized from its politics of inclusion and exclusion (to and from the real), as part of the process of a dialectic organisism. Works like the twitter-bots and MangAI are suggested as motivation for its acceleration.

As a matter of fact at this point in time, what seems more important, and what is missing from the traditional measure of existence for the machine inside the social (the Turing test) is the machine of seeking a measure of existence for itself more as a part of life itself rather than it’s simulation. As life is it’s organic part (their metabolic relationship) it is itself responsible of transforming their relationship from ‘hierarchical’ to ‘dialectic’, as a problem and a cause already included in-itself.

So for any future there is to come, the folk poetry of the field grants you with a useful guidance: “Attention is all you need”.