Beyond the Turing Test

The Turing test was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950 in a paper called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." The Glasgow-Habecker test was proposed seventy years later, in 2020.

The Turing test is a test of a computer's ability to provide responses to questions that would be indistinguishable from those given by a human. The idea was inspired by a Victorian parlor game called the imitation game, in which a man would try to give responses to questions that would be indistinguishable from those of a woman, or vice versa.

The idea was that if a computer could give responses that could not be told from those of a human, then the computer was exhibiting intelligence, or something so similar that it would not matter whether intelligence produced it or not. In other words, if the computer could fool a human judging the responses, it would have passed the test.

The Glasgow-Habecker test is based on emotional intelligence. The idea behind it is that two human beings in conversation will naturally begin to detect, mirror, and affect each other's emotional valences. Bringing these emotions under control, no matter how disregulated they were to begin with, is called coregulation. The Glasgow-Habecker test asserts that a computer is displaying emotional intelligence if it can coregulate the emotions of a human, with the result that the human feels better or at least feels understood.

Like the Turing test, the Glasgow-Habecker test relies only on textual language. It is also worth knowing that both tests are based on a human's self-reported experience. "Did that seem to come from a human?" and "Did you feel better after that interaction?" Neither test proves intelligence directly. Rather, each tries to direct efforts away from trying to create what intelligence is and refocus it on getting computers to do something that intelligence does. In so doing, each test can be used to discover evidence for the effective simulation of intelligence of a different type.