Regarding Hayles, Hodges, Gender & the Imitation Game
There were some great questions about the Turing Test. This very thorough Stanford Encyclopedia entry is helpful (mostly): The Turing Test (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
I found this moment of particular interest:
About this game, Turing (1950) writes:
I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 109, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 percent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. … I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. (Qtd in Oppy)
For those interested in the gendered imitation game that is part of the basis for the Turing Test regarding “thinking machines,” I found an article by Amy Kind that is clear and insightful. And, as Kind notes, the Stanford Encyclopedia entry does not even address the gendered aspect of Turing’s Imitation Game, which is an omission worthy of note. Kind’s article does a lovely job of breaking down the two primary academic interpretations of the gendered imitation game’s relevance to the Turing Test and to wider conversations. Then she unpacks Geneva’s ideas, which align with what Hayle’s implies. Genevas wrote that Turing’s implied man/woman/thinking machine conflation is important because, “the evolution of thinking machines might provide a solution to the strangling binarism” that comes along with the differentiation between the sexes” (Qtd in Kind). We will encounter another hopeful reflection on the innate ungendered-ness of thinking machines when we read Haraway. Feel free to use any of the resources I reference in these responses to your exit tickets in any of your assignments for this class.
Regarding “Are we already Cyborgs?”
Some lovely thoughts were shared regarding AI Meta Chips, and that there are cyborgs among us. A student posited that because we can choose to disconnect there is still a difference between our consciousness and tech, another that the connection can be easily broken (that a cyborgs connection runs deeper than our current interfaces with phones) while another noted that our constant engagement with tech alters our day-to-day in a way that keeps us “plugged in.”
Some really beautiful questions were asked that are of the type of philosophical nature I wouldn’t want to answer for you, but that I do think are important-
Where do we draw the line between human and machine? What is the actual boundary that makes a human slip into being a cyborg or a machine slip into being “human”? And would empathy necessarily make a machine human? Another great question was regarding if it is possible for machines to think, would they just think in a different way from us? (I think embodiment is important for this one too.) All of these tie into Hayles’ contention that we are already posthuman. Here she is not necessarily saying that we are becoming machines, she is just saying that machines, the creation of thinking machines specifically, is changing how we define what human is.
As for whether or not the Turing Test has been passed, this one does not have a clear answer. According to Mitchell
Turing offered his test as a philosophical thought experiment, not as a practical way to gauge a machine’s intelligence. However, the Turing Test has taken on iconic status in the public’s mind as the ultimate milestone of artificial intelligence (AI)—the chief metric to determine if general machine intelligence has arrived. And now, nearly 75 years later, the reporting on AI is full of pronouncements that the Turing Test has finally been passed by chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude. Last year, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman posted, “[G]ood sign for the resilience and adaptability of people in the face of technological change: the [T]uring test went whooshing by and everyone mostly went about their lives.” Various media headlines have made similar claims, such as one newspaper’s report that “ChatGPT passes the famous ‘Turing test’—suggesting the AI bot has intelligence equivalent to a human. (Mitchell)
Works Cited
Kind, Amy, 'Computing Machinery and Sexual Difference: The Sexed Presuppositions Underlying the Turing Test', in Keya Maitra, and Jennifer McWeeny (eds), Mind and Gender&Race &, in Keya Maitra, and Jennifer McWeeny (eds), Feminist Philosophy of Mind (New York, 2022; online edn, Oxford Academic, 22 Sept. 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190867614.003.0003, accessed 11 Sept. 2026.
Oppy, Graham and David Dowe, "The Turing Test", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/turing-test/>.
Mitchell, Melanie. The Turing Test and our shifting conceptions of intelligence. Science. (2024). DOI:10.1126/science.adq9356