Computing Community Consortium Blog

The goal of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) is to catalyze the computing research community to debate longer range, more audacious research challenges; to build consensus around research visions; to evolve the most promising visions toward clearly defined initiatives; and to work with the funding organizations to move challenges and visions toward funding initiatives. The purpose of this blog is to provide a more immediate, online mechanism for dissemination of visioning concepts and community discussion/debate about them.


Solving the Turing Test by 2029?

July 6th, 2012 / in big science, conference reports, research horizons, Research News / by Erwin Gianchandani

Ray Kurzweil at The Wall Street Journal's annual CTO Network Conference in Washington, DC, last week [image courtesy Ralph Alswang for The Wall Street Journal].At The Wall Street Journal’s annual CFO Network Conference in Washington, DC, last week, inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil spoke about “frontiers in technology,” discussing, among other topics, recent advances in artificial intelligence — and what they might mean for the future of the field. During his comments, Kurzweil referenced the Turing test and made an interesting prediction (emphasis added):

“Alan Turing in 1950 defined a way in which we can say that a computer is operating at human levels. You have a human judge interview a computer and a human — maybe several of each. If the judge can’t tell which is which, we say the computers have passed the Turing test.

 

“Every year, our Turing test is run by the Loebner Foundation, and the computers are getting better every year. If you just look at the rate at which they’re getting better, the crossover is about 2029. My prediction all along has been that computers will be able to deal with a full range of human intelligence by 2029.

Check out a couple short clips of Kurzweil’s comments at the CTO Network Conference after the jump…

On the modification of life and the merging of technology and people:

On the many similarities between humans and machines:

And here’s a set of edited excerpts of the conversation between Kurzweil and WSJ Deputy Managing Editor Alan Murray.

Share your thoughts below!

(Contributed by Erwin Gianchandani, CCC Director)

Solving the Turing Test by 2029?

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