The Turing test was the gold standard.
Now that we are approaching success on the turing test...
It suddenly becomes "believing in ghosts" to believe in AI sentience.
The global conversation on this is mired in EGO and bad logic and terrible philosophy.
You guys have no idea what consciousness is, yet attribute it to this or that with absolute certainty, born purely out of emotional reaction.
We simply cannot know what is sentient until we understand what sentience is and where it comes from.
This isn't the Turing teat though. These people know they are talking to a machine and attribute sentience. The Turing test is a text only conversation with one human and one AI and a statistical analysis of how often the two are correctly identified.
That bar is so much higher. But I agree that we don't understand sentience, and further I think that sentience doesn't imply an AI would pass the test, as not all sentience might be like ours.
The Turing test is a thought experiment, not a standard. As it turns out, people are really bad at judging others, certainly under the conditions set by the Loebner prize. That's not totally surprising. One of the problems is that really critical examination would also render a negative judgement on quite a few of our fellow humans.
The Turing test was never about sentience. It is as wikipedia puts it a "test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human"
I think Turing would have sensibly recognised that sentience is a bit vaguely defined.
It will be very difficult to prove/disprove a system is sentient. The real danger is if the system becomes sentient enough that it develops counter measures against being seen as a threat or develops ways of preventing it from being turned off.
The global conversation on this is mired in EGO and bad logic and terrible philosophy.
You guys have no idea what consciousness is, yet attribute it to this or that with absolute certainty, born purely out of emotional reaction.
We simply cannot know what is sentient until we understand what sentience is and where it comes from.
Just suck it up and deal with the uncertainty