Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” in Mind journal, posing the question: Can machines think? He proposes the Imitation Game — a test of machine intelligence through conversation.
The Dartmouth Conference coins “Artificial Intelligence” as a field. McCarthy, Minsky, Rochester, and Shannon gather to explore whether machines can simulate any aspect of intelligence.
Joseph Weizenbaum creates ELIZA, the first chatbot. Users form emotional attachments to the program, raising profound questions about human vulnerability to the illusion of understanding.
IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov. While not a Turing test, it marks a pivotal moment — machines outperform humans in the most cerebral of games.
IBM Watson defeats Jeopardy! champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Natural language understanding reaches a milestone — machines parse ambiguity, puns, and cultural knowledge.
A chatbot posing as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy convinces 33% of judges it is human at the Royal Society. The first program claimed to “pass” the Turing test — sparking debate about what passing truly means.
GPT-3 demonstrates unprecedented language fluency. 175 billion parameters generate text indistinguishable from human writing in many contexts. The line between human and machine expression begins to dissolve.
As AI generates art, writes poetry, and holds conversations — the question Turing asked in 1950 only deepens. Perhaps the test was never about the machine. Perhaps it was always about us.
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”— Alan Turing, 1950