ABSTRACT
Turing’s imitation game and test is over seventy years old and has survived several rounds of criticism and defense. This chapter gives a brief overview of the reception of Turing’s test proposal along the decades since the publication of his 1950 paper, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence.’ It benefits from and extends Stuart Shieber’s 2004 philosophical anthology, The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence. Compared to Shieber, this chapter will focus more on historical development and context. The goal here is not to provide a complete survey, but rather to identify periods in the broader secondary literature and to explore the important conceptual elements that characterize each period: from the early reception of Turing’s proposal in the 1950s, often as neo-behaviorism in philosophy and as a preliminary definition of machine intelligence in the emerging studies of artificial intelligence (AI) in the United States; to its use in the debates on mechanism and consciousness from the 1960s to the 1990s; and to its rejection by computer scientists and AI researchers and its defense by philosophers from the 1990s to the 2010s.
