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Comment by alexandros | Hacker News Reader

"humans have qualities that machines can never possess regardless of if they pass Turing tests or not"

I don't think you understand the Turing test.

To be fair, I don't think you do either (in fact most people don't), but I agree with your underlying point that we ought to be able to make a machine that mimics human behavior well enough to fool people and eliminate the human-à-human jobs.

The original Turing test involved two closed rooms and text based terminals. That way of communicating has an extremely low emotional bandwidth. While it may test the machine's ability to reason like a human it does not test whether or not the human connects emotionally to the machine.

For example, a machine can be made to sing better than a human from a purely technical perspective. But once you know that the person singing is a human being with a history of happiness and pain, ups and downs, you can connect on a deeper level. The song gets meaning.

Or a soul.

I mean, would you want a machine or a human singing on your wedding?

When it really matters we will always pick the human.

Now, what is a more likely development is an _augmented_ human, improved by machines. The wedding singer will use autotune (or at least a mic). And that's fine, I guess, it's still a job.

So it's not enough for the machine to pass the Turing test.

So what? That doesn't mean you can't build a machine indistinguishable from a human, except that you don't need to pay it.

Some people might use recorded music instead of a live singer at their wedding.

That job isn't automatic.

You might always pick a human, I'd pick what I liked best. I remain convinced of the possibility of a machine being more creative than any human, and being better able to understand and connect with "our soul", though I hate to use that language. If technical ability is one variable to optimize for, emotional connecting ability is just another.

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