The Human-or-Machine Issue: Turing-Inspired Reflections on an Everyday Matter

How will knowing, or not knowing, whether an agent is a human or a machine influence our interactions?

Alan Turing’s 1950 paper³⁷ introduced the famed “imitation game” as a means of determining whether a computer can be considered intelligent, thus informing the definition of machine intelligence. Over the years, the Turing test has been the subject of analysis and discussion, resulting in several variants, and has been reflected upon in retrospective reviews (see, for example, French¹⁰). Similar tests have been proposed in quite different areas, including automotive, games, urban and industrial planning, biological and biochemical modeling, and odor reproduction. The purposes of such variant tests range from offering practical techniques to discern an agent’s identity to serving as a norm, or yardstick, for assessing the quality and fidelity of a model or reproduction process in mirroring the original’s properties (see, for example, Harel¹¹).
Here, we completely sidestep the issue of defining or measuring intelligence, as well as the practical question of whether a machine can be built to replace, or mimic, a person in the performance of some specific task.³³
Instead, we look more broadly at a concept that we term the human-or-machine issue (H-or-M issue). In a future world, where, in some interactions, machines will be able to impressively mimic humans, new social, psychological, functional, and technical issues are bound to become relevant. For example:
Will humans care whether the agent they interact with is a human or a machine, and if yes, why?
How will a person’s behavior or emotional state differ between interactions with another human and interactions with a machine whose behavior is indistinguishable from a human’s?
How will the answer to the question of an agent’s human-or-machine identity (hereafter, the H-or-M question) be elicited?
Will human language and social practices change when machines can adequately mimic humans?
Will machine-machine interactions change when the behavior of one or both of the participants is very close to a human’s?
Will machines indeed be indistinguishable from humans, or will this be a non-issue because openly taking advantage of machine capabilities will be prioritized over manifesting human-like behavior?
In examining these questions, we discuss research, opinions, and predictions about differences between humans and machines, and differences between human-human and human-machine interactions.