Why Alan Turing Wanted AI Agents to Make Mistakes

While it can be exciting to be swept up by the idea of super-intelligent computers that have no need for human input, the true history of smart machines shows that our AI is only as good as we are. If this computer could be programmed to play the imitation game so well that the judge couldn’t tell if he was talking to a machine or a human, then it would be reasonable to conclude, Turing argued, that the machine was intelligent. Turing understood that if careful readers of the computer’s response picked up the mistake, they would believe that they were corresponding with a human, assuming that a machine would not make such a basic arithmetic error.

Source: spectrum.ieee.org