Indeed the capabilities of such an Artificial Intelligence may well be impossible for a human to comprehend. The singularity is an event dependent on the overall improvement and power of Artificial Intelligence where intelligent machines can design successive generations of increasingly more powerful machines, eventually creating intelligence that firstly is equivalent to that of humans and then surpasses it. On the other hand dare we suggest that either Shanahan or Kurzweil is incorrect? So shouldn’t we do something about such developers, maybe lock them up, well away from any laptop in case they design a programme of destruction. Because if Murray Shanahan and Ray Kurzweil and their colleagues are correct then the developers of the computer programmes which compete in the Turing test are, if they are successful, about to put an end to the human race. It is therefore, we feel, of vital importance that we look at various aspects of this question. Consider this, for example, from Murray Shanahan of Imperial College London: “Of course the Turing Test hasn’t been passed…We are still a very long way from achieving human-level AI”. Interestingly the main academic argument which was thrown up was that the machine which passed the test did not exhibit human-like intelligence, and therefore, the test could not have been passed. One interesting corollary of this is that when it was announced in 2014 that the Turing test had been finally passed there was an understandable response from those same quarters that it was not possible for such an event to have occurred, presumably because we were still here in sterling health to both make and debate the pronouncement. Unfortunately the assumed chain of events which means that passing the Turing test sounds the death knell for humanity appears to have become engrained in the thinking in certain quarters. What we do wish to dispel, however, is the assumption which links passing the Turing test with the achievement for machines of human-like or human-level intelligence.

In this paper we do not wish to dispute the latter of these arguments, dramatic though it is. The direct consequence of this, as pointed out by Kurzweil and others, is that the singularity will be upon us, thereby resulting in the demise of the human race. There are those who believe that passing the Turing test means that human-level intelligence will have been achieved by machines.

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