Alan Turing was recently announced as the face of the new £50 note for his code breaking contributions in World War II and laying the foundations of computer science. However, Turing’s work still challenges and inspires many people working today, especially those in robotics and artificial intelligence.
In 1950 he asked, “Can machines think?”, and came up with a test that researchers still turn to as a way of judging whether a computer could be considered truly intelligent in the same way as humans. But, coming from an age where autonomous robots were only just in their infancy, the Turing Test was only designed to assess artificial brains, not a complete artificial person.
Now that we have increasingly realistic looking androids, we need a 21st-century version of the test. My colleagues and I have designed a “Multimodal Turing Test” to judge a machine’s appearance, movement, voice and what we call embodied artificial intelligence (EAI). This is a measure of how well artificial intelligence is integrated with a robotic body in order to expresses a personality.
This means we can systematically compare a humanoid robot to a living counterpart. In this way, we can ask the question: “Can we build robots that are perceptually indistinguishable from humans?”
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