So, let me talk a little bit about Turing’s famous test for intelligence, the “imitation game.” Everybody thinks they know what that is: it’s a man talking to a computer, and the computer is trying to convince him that he’s not a machine, he’s a man. If he talks like a man and knows what a man knows, if he presents as a man, then we don’t have to get into the dark metaphysical issues of what’s going on in his black-box heart and spirit; the machine keeps up the façade, so therefore he’s one of us, he’s perfectly fine. That’s the Turing Test as it’s commonly described.
However, that’s by no means what Turing actually says in his original paper on the subject. The real Turing imitation game is not about that process at all. It’s about an entirely different process of gender politics and transvestism. It’s about a machine imitating a woman.
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