In Douglas R. Hofstadter’s book “Metamagical Themas”, he has a section where he sort of honors and gives a shoutout and cover’s Alan Turing a bit, as his lead in to a dialogue between 3 people discussing the idea of “can machines get to the point of becoming conscious, and how is that defined? I attempt to present this dialogue in hopes of bringing a worthwhile and thought provoking(at least in my opinion, not that that’s worth much) conversation to more people. Then I cover more of Hofstadter’s observations in his interactions further analyzing this topic. The Turing test of Alan’s (or “imitation game” as he called it) was a test created to determine if a machine had crossed that line into the realm of having consciousness. Even though this was written in 1985, and we are on the cusp of legitimate AI system(I.e. self driving cars, neurolink, (and as I used as an example in episode) the alpha go program that beat number 1 ranked player Lee Sedol 4-1 at go, only to be then beaten by alpha zero(a program only given the rules of go and played itself) 100-0. Ray Kurzweil talked about the 6 stages of the singularity wrote man and AI would be indistinguishable in the singularity. We are on that precipice now; a future that may be within some of our lifetimes. So it’s neat to encounter this dialogue, and the thoughts it provokes even now; words still having validity. I’m curious what others think. At this point, so much information is out there available, I’m simply trying to gather, assimilate, and share as much as I can that I feel connects with all of you.