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The IA (Intelligence Augmentation) Turing Test and the Future of Work
Everything that can be automated will be automated — and everything that has been automated can be augmented by AI.
What does that mean for the future of work? Let’s explore…
Many years ago I wrote an article in a Swedish magazine about a variant of the Turing test that I called “the expert Turing test”.
For those not familiar with the Turing test, it is meant to test a computer for general intelligence, by asking questions using a terminal to a computer and a human behind two locked doors. If it’s not possible to distinguish between the computer and the human, the computer has “won”. It is to be considered equally intelligent (perhaps even conscious — but that’s another debate) as the human.
In my variant of the test, I exchanged the computer with a human using an internet connected computer in one room and an expert on a certain topic in the other. The human with the internet computer is a complete novice on the same topic.
When it’s not possible to distinguish the expert from the novice-with-computer, the novice “wins”.
The idea is that the human mind is augmented by the computer, to the level where even an amateur can perform certain tasks like a pro. The “expert Turing test” is thus a kind of IA…
