Ideological Turing Test

The Turing Test, originally developed by Alan Turing in 1950 as the "imitation game," was meant to serve as a measure for intelligent-seeming behavior in machines.

In essence, a user would engage with the machine at a distance, while also engaging with a human in the same way. If the user couldn't tell the difference, or was wrong about which conversational partner was the machine and which was the human, that would suggest the machine could exhibit human-like intelligent behavior.

The idea here wasn't to concretely determine whether or not a machine was capable of thought, because "thinking" is such an ill-defined thing that we're still debating whether non-human animals are capable of intelligence of the sort we should care about.

Instead, the purpose of this test was to figure out whether the trappings of intelligence could be produced by a machine, and this would then further discussion and exploration into what that might mean for our relationship with machines, and our conception of intelligence.

The term "Ideological Turing Test" was coined back in 2011 to address how we engage with people with whom we disagree about fundamental things.