Outing Artificial Intelligence. Reckoning with Turing Tests

Abstract

Various anthropocentric fallacies have hobbled the development of artificial intelligence as a broadly based and widely understood set of technologies. Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game” was an ingenious thought experiment but also ripe for fixing the thresholds of machine cognition according to its apparent similarity to a false norm of exemplary human intelligence. To disavow that fragile self-refection is, however, easier than composing alternative roles for human sapience, industry, and agency along more heterogeneous spectrums. As various forms of machine intelligence become increasingly infrastructural, the implications of this difficulty are geopolitical as well as philosophical.