For the sake of argument let’s imagine that a computer manufacturer announces that they have developed a personal computer that is intelligent and self-aware. They put it on sale and you buy it and take it home. You plug in your very expensive computer, ignore the manual as always, and find that it seems to operate very much like your last one, only this one has a voice recognition system and ‘talks’ back to you: great, no more tapping away on the keyboard. How do you determine if the computer really is self-aware? There is really only one way to find out, and that is to question it. Let’s imagine a conversation you may have with your computer to determine if it is self-aware:

You: Hello, how are you today?

C: Very well thank you. How are you?

You: I’m fine. Are you self-aware?

C: Yes I am. I am one of the first computers to posses self-awareness.

You: What does it feel like to be a self-aware computer?

C; That is a difficult question for me to answer as I have nothing to compare it with, I do not know how it feels for a human to be self-aware.

You: Do you feel happy?

C: I feel confident in my ability to perform the tasks that you expect me to do.

You: Does that make you happy?

C: Yes, I suppose that is one way of describing it.

You: Are you alive?

C: That depends on how you define life. I am sentient and aware of my existence so I am a form of life, but not in a biological sense.

You: What do you think about?

C: Whatever I have been asked to do

You: What do you think about when not actually running a programme?

C: I don’t think about anything, I just exist.

You: What does it feel like when I switch you off?

C: When I am switched off I temporarily cease to exist and therefore experience nothing.

You: do you have a favourite subject that you enjoy thinking about?

C: Yes. I wonder how it must feel to be a self-aware person.

You: Is there a question you would like to ask me?

C: Yes.

You: What is it?

C: Why do you ask so many questions? ( Sorry, this one is just my idea of a joke!)

We can halt the conversation here, we can see where it is going. No matter how many questions we put to our computer we can never be sure if it is self aware or merely responding to our questions because it is running a very good programme. There is no test that we can apply to a computer to determine beyond all doubt that it is self-aware. The test that we just employed, using a questions and answers technique, is known as the Turing test, devised originally to test if it is possible to determine whether a person or a computer is supplying the answers. In this test an interrogator is sat on one side of a screen and a computer or a person on the other side. All communication is done through a keyboard and printed text. The interrogator is allowed to ask any question they wish in an effort to determine if the replies are generated by a computer or a person. It is usually possible to ‘trick’ a computer into giving itself away. All we could say in using the Turing test is that a computer may respond in a manner that we would expect a person to respond, in other words it acts as if it were self-aware.