The Turing Test has been misunderstood and literalised by computer scientists. In the modern day, the “Turing Test” has two major forms.

The first form is as a literal test involving a computational device and real fleshy people. The general idea is that, if a computational device is indistinguishable from the fleshy counterpart, the computer is said to have “passed” the Turing Test.

The second form is as a test to see if a user is a fleshy person. These are captchas and other increasingly difficult tests that are tasks that traditionally could only be performed by people. These tests have historically been used by companies to train computer imaging models, slowly but completely destroying their original purpose.

The first form is the more general understanding of the Turing test, whereas the second form is generally only used in its specific context.

However, I think that the original ideas of Alan Turing surrounding the so-called “Turing test” are completely misunderstood. I do not think he meant it as a literal test performed on a computer to see if it was indistinguishable from a human. Rather, I think it was largely a philosophical idea.

Taking the Turing Test as a philosophical idea, it creates a scenario to ponder one question: can machines think? In this scenario, Turing proposes the imitation game, the idea being that if a computer became indistinguishable in act from a human person, then it doesn’t really matter if it can think or not. At that point, being indistinguishable from humans who (allegedly) definitely can think, it does not serially matter if the underlying mechanics of computation allow for thought, for they have produced an object capable of thought.