Key points

We’ve built machines that can sound human, maybe too human.

Real intelligence may come from difference, not imitation.

Maybe the future of AI depends on letting it stay strange and letting it teach us new ways to think.

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed a now-famous experiment that we all know. It was a conversation between a person and a machine, judged by whether the human could tell the difference. Practical and itself being binary (yes or no), it gave early computer science something it needed, a goal post. But it also planted a seed that would grow into a problem we still haven’t named.

We’ve spent 70 years teaching machines to pass as human. And I believe that we’ve gotten very good at it. Language models now write essays and code that feel remarkably human-like, perhaps

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