Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I watched a video by my favorite British history YouTuber and learned a lot about British activism in the 1970s working against a fascist movement. Heather reviewed Uncharmed by Lucy Jane Wood and found it to be “a fun, cozy book that is perfect for fall.” Tina liked The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth by Barbara O’Neal, but preferred the author’s other books.

Most of us are most familiar with Alan Turing as the British genius who figured out how to break the German Enigma code during World War II. That story is the reason that we visited Bletchley Park when we were in England.

The machine that Turing built to break the Enigma codes

That was all a giant secret during Turing’s lifetime. He was much better known for the Turing Test — a thought experiment published in 1950.

Seventy-five years ago, in the October issue of the philosophy journal Mind, the British computer pioneer Alan Turing published a paper called “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.” In it, he dealt with the question of whether we would ever build machines that think. Given the difficulty of determining the definition of “think,” he proposed an alternative, a test that could be answered in a rigorous way.

By Bilby – Own work, Public Domain, Link

If I conversed via keyboard with a human and a computer, could I tell which was which?

The Turing Test is famous in computer science circles. I learned about it, first, from my dad who was a computer programmer. I studied it while getting my software engineering degree in the 1980s. We all believed that someday a computer would pass the Turing Test, but we certainly weren’t there in the 1980s.

In the computer lab in college, I played with ELIZA, using the DOCTOR script. She simulated a conversation with a psychotherapist. But she couldn’t go very deep and was easily confused.

A few years ago, I tried a couple of apps that were meant to provide a little help with things like developing good habits and working through difficult decisions. I was actually surprised at how bad that experience was — only slightly better than my experience with ELIZA.

I’ve been cautious about using AI software. I worry about the environmental impact. I wish that I was seeing more leadership around the societal changes that are likely to occur. I’m concerned about the psychological implications of an ELIZA that actually worked. Would a computer helper be addictive? Would it make relationships with real-life people more difficult?

When I realized that a big anniversary of the Turing Test was on the calendar this year, my big question was: Have we done it? Has a computer passed the Turing Test? Even with my limited exposure to AI, I guessed the answer was ‘yes.’

And, I was right!

“A Turing test of whether AI chatbots are behaviorally similar to humans” was a paper published in February 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. They concluded that “ChatGPT-4 exhibits behavioral and personality traits that are statistically indistinguishable from a random human from tens of thousands of human subjects from more than 50 countries.”

Much of the scholarly paper is only of interest to computer scientists and others who pay a lot of attention to AI.

Fortunately for the general reader, Stanford published an article, “Study finds ChatGPT’s latest bot behaves like humans, only better” about the work. Check it out to learn about how computers behave like humans.

How do you feel about machines that are indistinguishable from humans?