Is there anything computers can't do—or at least won't be able to do at some future time? They have already gotten pretty powerful: we've developed cars that drive themselves, protein-folding software that discovers new medicines, and massive encyclopedias you can fit in your pocket—not to mention all those tools to help students cheat on their papers. The way things are going, ten years from now we may all be obsolete.

And yet there are still plenty of things humans can do that computers can’t, like feel emotions, fall in love, or hold a real conversation. That's why many of us think it's absurd to imagine you can have an AI friend, let alone an AI love partner: they’ll never understand you, because they can’t think.

Alan Turing, however, would have disagreed. Even in 1950, when the only computers in existence were gigantic behemoths that could barely do anything, he thought that one day they might be able to think just like humans. How will we know when they can? Well, that's where Turing's “imitation game" — nowadays referred to as the “Turing test” — comes in. If a computer can fool you into believing it’s a human, that in itself is proof that it can think. After all, the only way Ray knows Josh is sentient is by conversing with him; why should it be any different for a machine? If the entity in the other room manages to speak sensibly and say stuff that surprises you, then it’s a mind, whether it’s made of carbon or of silicon.

For many of us, the Turing test feels inadequate. If a computer tricks you into thinking it’s a human, all you can conclude is that you have been fooled. Large language models are really good at mimicking humans... but that doesn’t mean anything interesting is going on in there; the lights are on, but nobody’s home.

And if the Turing test does prove computers capable of thought, there's an even deeper worry. Maybe it's not just that machines can become like us—maybe it's that we are already like machines, which is why they can do all this stuff in the first place. That's more or less what Turing believed: he saw the brain as a big computer, with a gigantic number of tiny little bots, each doing one very simple thing. Add them all up and you get Proust, geometry, and bowling leagues. For some, that's a pretty depressing picture of our mental lives. After all, it sure feels like there's something more to human mental life than just zeros and ones. What about art? What about friendship? What about love?

We'll see what our guest has to say: it’s Juliet Floyd from Boston University, editor of Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing.