The prediction, in brief:

Without a very powerful universal interface there is no way to filter the huge amount of information becoming available to us. Let’s say I want to know about the information in 150 psychology journals. Even with a flock of graduate students working on the problem, I couldn’t cover the field properly. But a computer that can pass an unrestricted Turing test could do it easily. It would be trivial.

Predictor: Epstein, Robert

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Charles Platt covers the field of artificial intelligence, interviewing Robert Epstein, founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies. Platt writes:”Robert Epstein is deadly serious about artificial intelligence. As founder of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies, he has led research on how people interact with computers. He looks forward to intelligent ‘digital assistants’ that can act as all-around gophers, finding what we want, evaluating it, summarizing it, and presenting it to us in the most efficient way. ‘Without a very powerful universal interface,’ he explains, ‘there is no way to filter the huge amount of information becoming available to us. Let’s say I want to know about the information in 150 psychology journals. Even with a flock of graduate students working on the problem, I couldn’t cover the field properly. But a computer that can pass an unrestricted Turing test could do it easily. It would be trivial.'” [In 1950, Alan Turing proposed that if a computer could successfully impersonate a human being during a free-form exchange of text messages, then the computer should be considered intelligent – this became known as the “Turing test.”]

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information

Subtopic: Intelligent Agents/AI

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: What’s it Mean to Be Human, Anyway? Charles Platt Reports on the Latest Battle to Determine the Most Human Computer, Even as He Worries That He May be the Least Human Human

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/turing_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney