26 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
ELIZA: Do you think coming here will help you not to be unhappy ?
USER: | need some help, that much seems certain.
ELIZA: What would it mean to you if you got some help ?
USER: Perhaps | could learn to get along with my mother.
ELIZA: Tell me more about your family.
USER: My mother takes care of me.
ELIZA: Who else in your family takes care of you ?
USER: My father.
ELIZA: Your father ?
USER: You are like my father in some ways.
ELIZA: What resemblence do you see ?
USER: You are not very aggressive but | think you don’t want me to notice that.
ELIZA: What makes you think | am not very aggressive ?
USER: You don’t argue with me.
ELIZA: Why do you think | don’t argue with you ?
USER: You are afraid of me.
ELIZA: Does it please you to believe | am afraid of you ?
USER: My father is afraid of everybody.
ELIZA: What else comes to your mind when you think of your father ?
USER: Bullies.
ELIZA: Does that have anything to do with the fact that your boyfriend made you come here ?
If you think Eliza a bit odd, you are right. Perhaps you won't hire her just yet. The program looks for keywords in speech, and parrots them back at you interspersed with a few stock phrases. If you type a sentence containing the word “job”, the computer will say, “Tell me more about your job? It’s a simple program and runs to only three pages of text. It shows how good a job you can do with very few resources and how far we are away from a real human being. More complex programs with a larger repertoire have been built and can hold a plausible conversation. People are occasionally taken in by them and are quite shocked when told they have been conversing with a machine. If you’re on your guard, they are easy to spot. So far, no one has built a computer capable of holding an extended human conversation and fooling a human into thinking it’s a person. Incidentally, having a sympathetic listener is so important to human beings these programs are used in psychotherapy and can be as effective as drugs.
Turing proposed a test to tell whether a computer had truly achieved human intelligence called the imitation game. His argument is as follows:
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