The Exterior Darkness

It’s Alan Turing’s world: we’re all just living in it. His “Imitation Game,” now known simply as the “Turing Test,” helped determine how we think about our machines. It also claimed to determine whether our machines might think about us. Now that we are all transfixed by the eerie gaze of AI-generated human faces, Turing’s thought experiment is teetering on the knife-edge of reality. “If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an AI—that’s the end of democracy,” frets Yuval Noah Harari, the notorious techno-futurist. What might happen if we lose the ability to distinguish between products of human thought and machine activity?