Stephen said
However, the Turing test has been used to argue that if a computer passes the turing test then it is conscious. 

Bu that’s just the point.  If an AI passes the Turing test then on what basis can you claim that it is not conscious that doesn’t also apply to your fellow humans?  

The Turing Test is a fascinating idea, but it’s never been proven to work. 

Your argument is that we can’t know machines aren’t conscious because we can’t know other humans are conscious.  But we don’t need to know that.  We know other humans are the same species as us, and are evolved to think and feel and experience reality along similar lines. Yes, we can ask the same questions Descartes asked, and the British Empiricists after him, but in the end, Hume was right–we are forced to accept the pervasiveness and therefore persuasiveness of perceived reality.  Or we are reduced to mere solipsism, and all inquiry becomes pointless (and so does science–Heisenberg never meant for his Uncertainty Principle to negate the findings of researchers). 

Therefore, if I am conscious, I may reasonably assume so is anyone else who is clearly of my species and not comatose.  And I may extend this to other life-forms that I can reasonably assume evolved along similar lines, or from which my own ancestors evolved from, since clearly consciousness clearly results from the evolution of complex life forms, which require a more sophisticated way of responding to the world than mechanistic drives can supply. 

But if I extend it to machines designed for no reason other than to pass a test (which is to say, to fool humans into believing they are also human), and which have no existence independent of their creators, the logic fails.  The only thing proven by a computer that passes the Turing Test is that the Turing Test doesn’t work.  It merely proves that someone has come up with a better con.

The Turing Test was proposed as a twist on the Imitation Game, where a judge interrogating two unseen humans of the opposite sex has to try and guess the sex of each.  Obviously the judge often guessed wrong.  So that proves a woman determined to be a man was really a man all along?  It proves that asking an unseen entity questions to try and determine his/her/its identity doesn’t prove anything.  Turing was a subtle man, and I like to think this may have been his point all along.  As a gay man, he knew that for a sentient being, identity is fluid.  But for a machine, so far, it’s quite fixed. 

Regarding HAL, everybody understands that’s a metaphor for Kubrick, right? 

Machines may not ever become human, but humans are quite capable of becoming more like machines, at least in their emotional responses. 

In any event, the idea of a sentient machine existed in SF long long before that movie came out (and the book created in tandem with it, which is frankly rather boring). 

I could see a computer with insect consciousness.  But for more than that, a digital mechanism simply would not be sufficient.  Life is more than just on or off.  Life is analog, not digital. 

Possibly the earliest iteration would be Ambrose Bierce’s story, Moxon’s Master.  Which posits that a machine could be a sore loser. 

Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on the screenplay, with Clarke’s duties being to come up with credible scientific ideas, instead of the usual Buck Rogers crap.  Kubrick wanted a sentient computer, so Clarke went about creating one, and the research to make HAL believable was his. 

The finished film was much more Kubrick than Clarke, obviously (it’s a director’s medium). Which is one reason Clarke came out with the book as a companion piece, which doesn’t so much explain the movie as give us Clarke’s idea of what the movie should have been.  He also provides an explanation for HAL’s murderous behavior that the movie doesn’t use, because Kubrick wasn’t much interested in explaining anything that happens in the story. 

The notion of an AI beginning in a childlike state could be traced to Asimov’s I, Robot.  The positronic computer known as The Brain, who talks like a toddler, and seems to express emotion, though even more primitive robots in Asimov’s stories seem emotional on some level. It’s made very clear that it’s been built along the lines of a human brain, and is contrasted with a more traditional digital computer which fails to solve the problem in the story. 

I think it comes down to loneliness.  We want to believe in AI’s for the same reason we want to believe in EBE’s.  But the truth is, we’ve never been alone here.  We just don’t have another intelligence we can have an intellectual conversation with.  I go off alone with my dog alone sometimes, precisely to get away from that.  And she’s more real to me than words on a screen ever could be. 

Consciousness isn’t dependent on whether or not other conscious beings can perceive it as such.  It either is or isn’t.  If you gotta ask, you’ll never know. 

Right, but Butler just talks about the possibility–the Erewhonians don’t have machines, because they believe this could happen.  It’s inspired by the industrial revolution, people being put out of work by automation (or being treated like machines themselves on factory assembly lines).  Butler didn’t know from computers. 

Bierce could not explain how a chess-playing clockwork automaton could develop consciousness (it couldn’t), but was probably influenced by a fake chess-playing machine called The Turk, which actually had a human player concealed inside it (which was revealed much later). 

Butler’s foresight is remarkable, but the story itself isn’t about AI.  It’s about how smart his utopian citizens are to not develop it.  There really isn’t any story–anymore than there is in More’s Utopia.  It’s an imaginary travelogue, which is how most of these things are written. 

(And now I belatedly understand why Frank Herbert’s Dune refers to the long-ago “Butlerian Jihad” where humans destroyed all intelligent machines and made their creation punishable by death.)

Robert said
Don’t forget Rosie the Robot on The Jetsons.   

Nothing in American pop culture is ever forgotten.  Not as long as we have cable.

** you do not have permission to see this link **

Stapledon can be amazing, but also very ponderous and preachy at times (it’s the H.G. Wells influence).  His best book is Sirius, which hits home emotionally in a way most of his other work does not.  Lem is basically a satirist (and a brilliant one) using SF tropes to get past the Soviet-era censors. 

American SF rules.  But you have to know where to look.  And when.  The pulp magazine editors did slow down the genre’s development, trying to appeal to adolescent males (of all ages), but starting in the 50’s, things began to change. 

Philip K. Dick makes Vonnegut look pretty conventional (Vonnegut got too obsessed with being seen as a ‘mainstream’ writer–abandoned the genre even while mining it for ideas, and frankly, his later work doesn’t appeal to me).  Dick’s plotting can be scattershot, but his ideas are staggeringly original, and he never fails to catch you offguard with his twists and turns, going where the story leads him. 

James Tiptree Jr. (real name Alice B. Sheldon, with a background in the behavioral sciences–she didn’t want to get typed as a woman writer) wrote mainly short stories, and has developed a lasting reputation for ground-breaking crypto-feminist work that questions basically everything.  Her pet peeve–entropy. 

Octavia Butler was perhaps revisiting Childhood’s End with her Lilith books, that show a post-apocalyptic earth colonized (in a manner of speaking) by a space-faring gene-harvesting race of aliens with an agenda far more interesting than turning humans into galactic circuitry.  As a black woman, she found many ways to subvert the cliches of the genre.  It is often very hard to know whose side she’s on.  But it ain’t the white male hegemony.  A great writer, by any standard.  If you want to know how great, try Kindred.

I’m not going to list all of them, but I must mention Michael Bishop, whose The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis would actually be on-topic for this forum.  😉

Love Simak.  The others I know about, but haven’t read.  As you can see, I prefer the later stuff.  But I can appreciate the old school.  Probably everyone should read A.E. Van Vogt, if only to know where Hollywood gets most of its ‘SciFi’ ideas from. 

Philip Jose Farmer shouldn’t be forgotten–he actually wrote a book under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout.  Another writer I like better than Vonnegut.

Norman Spinrad was as wild as they come.  Try Bug Jack Barron sometime.  (The ending doesn’t work as well in the Post-Obama era, but it still has a lot to say about the power of the TV pundit).  He was best in the short format, though. 

Poul Anderson straddles the old and the new, and does both of them justice.  Though his Calvinist sensibilities can be a mite depressing at times. 

I have a real weakness for Andre Norton, but nobody has read all of her.  Her SF was aimed at young adults mainly, but has a real conviction to it.  She also wrote fantasy a lot, and liked to blend the two genres. 

I keep meaning to read more Robert Silverberg. 

How is it possible nobody brought up Ursula LeGuin?  (I’m the only one who has mentioned any female writers at all–hmmm.)

Roger Zelazny wrote a story about translating Ecclesiastes into Martian.  Also a novel about an alien world where human survivors of a crashed colonist ship have become Hindu gods, and the original inhabitants have become Hindu demons.