When a Machine Passes the Turing Test …
… spammers will take over the world.
From Wikipedia on Turing Test
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The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine’s capability to perform human-like conversation. Described by Alan Turing in the 1950 paper “Computing machinery and intelligence”, it proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. It is assumed that both the human and the machine try to appear human. In order to keep the test setting simple and universal (to explicitly test the linguistic capability of the machine instead of its ability to render words into audio), the conversation is usually limited to a text-only channel such as a teletype machine as Turing suggested or, more recently IRC or instant messaging. |
The problem is that if a machine can successfully masquerade as a human, all spam filters will fail. No Turing Machine [i.e a computer program] will be able to detect spam. In fact it is worse - not even the human recipient of spam will be able to tell spam from genuine mail. Spammers will be able to craft an infinite variety of very original, moving stories in an automated fashion to impress the human to part with their money.
The only way to stop that would be some kind of human-authenticated and human-issued online passport, the use of which would be necessary if email is to be received by any human recipient. We are probably already moving towards that era.