The Job Candidate Imitation Game
January 26, 2015, 7:00:00 PM EST By Mike Russiello The Job Candidate "Imitation Game"Will computers eventually think like people do?
At the dawn of the information age, various far-sighted luminaries such as John Von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Vannevar Bush pondered whether computers might one day achieve human intelligence. Their discourse raised the question: "How will we recognize when a computer can think on its own?". In 1950, Turing published a paper entitled "Computing machinery and intelligence" which defined what has become known as the Turing Test as a means to determine if a machine is "intelligent." This test, recently celebrated in the movie "The Imitation Game," states that a computer could be said to "think" if a human interrogator could not tell it apart, through conversation, from a human being. Turing's proposed test sparked an ongoing debate about its validity. If you're interested, Walter Isaacson, in his 2014 book, "The Innovators," does a terrific job of highlighting some of the more interesting arguments and their rebuttals. For instance, he describes how, in 1980 John Searle suggested that if the computer is pre-programmed to respond in a certain way to every possible input, statement, or query from a person, then it could pass the Turing Test even if it never did anything more than consult a lookup table to obtain its response. A possible rebuttal is that, if the responses could convince a human it was real, then the "thinking" was embedded in that lookup table, which was part of the machine, and the Turing Test holds. A new test for computer intelligence And the debate goes on. In truth, nobody knows how to tell if a computer is really thinking. Since the philosophers have not succeeded, perhaps they need some help from the human capital sector. So, what if we slightly modified the Turing Test to:
Not as far-fetched as you may think Well. OK. We are not there yet. But can we measure how close we are to computers demonstrating human intelligence by how much of the process they could get through before being ‘found out?' If that's the case, then I think we're getting pretty close. For instance, let's consider the stages of the hiring process and ask yourself if a computer can pass each step:
So, do computers pass the test for hiring intelligence? No, not yet. But, if you're like me, you were surprised to see how far they can go within a hiring process. What if you use only video interviewing and you don't do background checks? When will a computer show up for their onboarding day? Probably about the same time as when robots beat the reigning world cup champions. Wrapping it up If Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was born 400 years later, do you think he he might have said something like:
As computers begin to more closely approximate humans, the selection process will need to weed them (the non-humans) out more effectively. Captchas will not be enough. Perhaps there will be new psychometric tests that can be developed to detect the way a computer thinks. Or perhaps a simple non-invasive blood test - administered by your mobile phone, will do the trick. |