Our colleague John Danaher recently pondered the possibility of a “Reverse Turing Test” in this intriguing blog post dated 21 July 2016. That is, instead of testing for a machine’s ability to think like a human, what if we tested for a human’s ability to think like a machine? (This theoretical paper by law professor Brett Frischmann on “Human-Focused Turing Tests” is what led Danaher to pose this novel question.) Moreover, according to Danaher (and to Frischmann), the ability to think like a machine may have some serious ethical implications. For our part, we have often wondered whether ethical rules like Kant’s famous “Categorical Imperative” or the Golden Rule could be reduced to a simple computer program, and we have long been fascinated by the Turing Test; by way of example, we used the original version of Alan Turing’s famous test to develop the notion of “probabilistic verdicts” in this paper. Accordingly, we will be blogging about the ideas in Danaher’s post and in Frischmann’s paper over the next few days.

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