Cheating on the Turing Test

Continuing from an earlier post...

If a system merely mimics a human, but does so consistently, it may be called intelligent, because it demonstrates intelligent behaviour. You don't need to crack it open and see if it's actually really intelligent or just behaving so, just as we can't crack open a human to see if it's really intelligent or just behaving so.

Suppose that you have a machine with a human inside, and all the machine does is copy the human's behaviour. It behaves as a human, intelligently. The machine without the human is not intelligent, but the whole system is. For example, an old telephone with a human on one end can pass the Turing test, but the telephone on its own can't.

What happens if you have a machine that brainlessly copies or transmits a human's behaviour, but is first separated from the human before it demonstrates that behaviour? Such a thing might not pass a Turing test, but it might be made to behave as a human for as long as necessary, and could be made without intelligence at all, just a behaviour copier.

That would be a poor demonstration of artificial intelligence, and I think it's similar to what today's Turing test candidates are doing. The best Turing candidates that I'm aware of essentially access huge databases of existing human responses, and derive their responses from that. It would be like a machine with thousands of humans in it, brainlessly selecting from the humans' responses. Of course, to do that with AI it needs to be at least clever or sophisticated. But still, the behaviours the AI is demonstrating were copied from a human. They're human behaviours, with the human separated from the copying machine.

Therefore it would be pointless to say such a machine reliably acted as a human. It merely transmitted the actions of humans. I do not think that beating the Turing test that way has anything to do with machine intelligence.

On the other hand, whatever argument can be made against such a machine, can probably be made against a human. Humans are literally human-copying machines, and there's no way to say that it's impossible for a human to go through life without an original thought. One might be able to merely copy what has already been done. If one complains of a machine, "that's not enough to demonstrate true intelligence", the same can be said of a human.