Could Sarah Palin Pass the Turing Test?

Watching Sarah Palin respond to her questioners, whether it's her most recent Tea Party sit-down or her Katie Couric interviews from two years ago, I can't help but think of the infamous Turing Test, devised by Alan Turing to test a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. According to the test, if a machine and a human were to engage in a (text only) language conversation with one another, and an observer was unable to tell which is which, the machine passes the test. For Turing, this was sufficient enough to be deemed "intelligence." Certainly, by these standards, Sarah Palin passes with flying colors. But still, there's always something a bit off about Palin's canned responses; it almost sounds like a conversation you'd have with a computer that gives normal sounding answers, but not ones that totally make sense, because, after all, it's been programmed. (For example, when Sarah Palin looks at her hand and then says "we've gotta reign in the spending, obviously" or when Katie Couric asks her an entire set of questions about McCain and the economy, she kind of just says "what we need now is regulation," or "Washington really needs to be shaken up," or "reform" followed by a few more indefinite articles and so forth.)

There are, by the way, a number of challenges, questioning the effectiveness of the Turing Test in capturing intelligence. The philosopher Hilary Putnam, for example, made the point that if the world had ceased to exist, a programmed computer would still refer to things in the world, simply because its been programmed; so a computer could communicate that "the grass is green," or "we need more regulation on Wall Street" even if grass, or Wall Street, had ceased to exist (both plausible in the future). The point is, a computer has never actually experienced green grass, and so it's not actually referring to anything, the way a human being indeed does refer to things it has experienced with its sensory perceptions.

Similarly, John Searle argued that a computer could manipulate language that it actually had no understanding of, and so it could not be described as "thinking" the way a human would. If, for example, a person simply looked up Chinese words, and followed instructions on how to draw Chinese symbols so it appeared on paper as though the human could converse in Chinese, we'd be inclined to argue that the person doesn't "know" Chinese. And that, Searle argues, is what a computer is doing.

And with Sarah Palin, I fear we have a very well programmed person that can manipulate language that it sometimes has very little understanding of. She might pass the Turing Test, but for Searle and Putnam, she's yet to prove she's ready.