alt Hacker News> Remember when the Turing test was a thing? No one seems to remember it was considered serious in 2020
To be clear, it's only ever been a pop science belief that the Turing test was proposed as a literal benchmark. E.g. Chomsky in 1995 wrote:
The question “Can machines think?” is not a question of fact but one of language, and Turing himself observed that the question is 'too meaningless to deserve discussion'.
The Turing test is a literal benchmark. Its purpose was to replace an ill-posed question (what does it mean to ask if a machine could "think", when we don't know ourselves what this means- and given that the subjective experience of the machine is unknowable in any case) with a question about the product of this process we call "thinking". That is, if a machine can satisfactorily imitate the output of a human brain, then what it does is at least equivalent to thinking.
"I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted."