What does Eugene Goostman’s triumph over the Turing Test really mean for the future of A.I.?

Here’s what Eugene Goostman isn’t: a supercomputer. It is not a groundbreaking, super-fast piece of innovative hardware but simply a cleverly-coded piece of software, heir to a program called ELIZA that was first developed—as a joke—in the nineteen-sixties. Users would type in their personal problems, and ELIZA, a crude simulation of a patient but nondirective therapist, would spit back responses—for example, “How does that make you feel about your family?”—without understanding the first thing about what the user had said. Many users were too narcissistic (or at least too naïve) to realize that the person they were “talking” to via teletype, an ancestor to text messaging, was a computer. Sooner or later, though, ELIZA would respond in ways that were ungrammatical, confusing, or just plain nonsense. Goostman can maintain the illusion of human conversation for longer than ELIZA, and its lexicon expands beyond psychiatry and family conflict. Unlike ELIZA, Goostman has a working grasp of grammar and a “personality,” engineered to fool judges into thinking he is a flippant adolescent. Here, for example, is how a slightly early version of the program responded last night when I asked about its reading habits: Marcus: Do you read The New Yorker?
 Goostman: I read a lot of books … So many—I don’t even remember which ones.
 Marcus: You remind me of Sarah Palin.
 Goostman: If I’m not mistaken, Sarah is a robot, just as many other “people.”
 We must destroy the plans of these talking trash cans! Clever—or so it initially seems.
 What Goostman’s victory really reveals, though, is not the advent of SkyNet or cyborg culture but rather the ease with which we can fool others. continue