Computer pioneer Alan Turing’s remarks in 1950 on the question, “Can machines think?” were misquoted, misinterpreted and morphed into the so-called “Turing Test”. The modern version says if you can’t tell the difference between communicating with a machine and a human, the machine is intelligent. What Turing actually said was that by the year 2000 people would be using words like “thinking” and “intelligent” to describe computers, because interacting with them would be so similar to interacting with people. Computer scientists do not sit down and say alrighty, let’s put this new software to the Turing Test - by Grabthar’s Hammer, it passed! We’ve achieved Artificial Intelligence!
This is the book that introduced me to the Chinese Room thought experiment and is the first thing I began to think of when the recent AI trend started to make a splash.
Peter Watts is great and though it’s not related to the topic at hand, I cannot recommend Starfish enough. Dark, haunting, and psychological. (It’s apparently part of a series but I never carried on)