I've taken to answering the phone "Potato" instead of "Hello", because a human will go "what?" and a robocall will fail to determine what language it should start its script in.

@quinn @cstross "necessary but not sufficient" is not the same as "dumb".

Golems were pottery, then irrigation happened and now intelligence was hydraulic engineering with "humors". When we moved to clockwork it was the mechanical Turk and TikTok of Oz. Then electricity showed up and powered Frankenstein and Metropolis (1927). Then we got Colossus and the Harvard Mark 1 actually implementing a difference engine and Turing asked what a scientific approach to the age old question might look like.

The Turing Test is like the Bechdel Test: quick smoketest to eliminate things that aren't worth a closer look.

The fact either filtered out most entrants for so long is a damning indictment of the state of the industry.

@quinn @cstross Turing was breaking new ground in 1950. The first computer to use transistors started construction 5 years later, and Fortran shipped 2 years after that.

Before either of those the British government chemically castrated Alan Turing for being gay, who then committed suicide in 1954.

Nobody's blaming Turing.