The question then is, "When everyone has access to free chatbots that can pass the turing test, what will they be used for?" The answer is "tons of stuff", and lots of people will try it at once. I think many applications will be niche.
Also, people will argue about what constitutes a Turing Test. For instance: https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/784162089397092352
However, we are not there yet. If someone had this today, how valuable would this be to Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon?
As for the definition of what the Turing Test is, it's definitely a fuzzy subject. My own arbitrary definition is "ability to convince a human that he's talking to another human after a sustained (based on time or length of) conversation whereas human is aware that there's a possibility that his interlocutor maybe a machine".
So, it's more of convincing a judge in Loebner Prize competition than a random troll on Twitter.
Ok, lets get this straight: ~6 million real human men paid real money that they earned through their labor or whatever to talk to bots and then paid more real money to do it again. Admittedly, they are 'cheaters', but 6 million men must have an IQ distribution nearly identical to that of the general population, i.e. they represent heterosexual human males in general. And yes, they were trying to get laid, these conversations are likely pretty brief, and mammalian males are not generally known for using their neocortex during mating.
Still, I think that 'counts' as far as passing the Turing Test. Yes, now we can move the goal posts to say that the bot has to teach me something, or guess what I was thinking, or generally be better than a man on tinder. But as a first pass of the TT, I think we have been here for a few years now.
Obviously such programs, while being works of art, are not interesting from AI/Machine Learning point of view.
Online lectures are great, but a personalized tutor could change things. If I restate back my understanding of a subject, and it clearly tells me why I'm mistaken, that's useful.
Reddit does this, kind of, today... but it's not really from an informed position. It's mostly uninformed people arguing with equally uninformed people. There are gems occasionally, but it's rare. That's why /r/depthhub was created
While it can answer your questions and check your understanding (it's a First Order Logic application), I haven't thought of the educational applications but I don't see why not... Thank you for bringing this up.
Also, I would use it to troll bureaucrats when I give up in frustration. It should try to force the bureaucrat to admit flat out that their logic is fundamentally flawed, and then ask them to propose a solution }:)
2. Privately invite representatives from each company to sign up for the site, and invite them to a blind auction on each brand pool their brand is involved with (Toyota exec sees car pool with top bid of $0.87/comment, decides to bid over it to put Toyota at the top of the pool)
3. Maintain a million Turing-beating chatbots that trawl reddit/facebook/twitter/quora/g+/HN/etc looking for brands, looks up the pools that brand is in, and then leaves a good PR comment for whichever brand has the highest bid across related pools. Swarm properly to distribute these comments evenly across the internet instead of clumping together.
4. ????
5. Profit (and/or become a real illuminati)
If I can say predict with a 30-40% accuracy things like riots in 3rd world nations based on collective analysis of data provided from thousands of sources (just by looking at places and sentiment), broken up by groups and affiliations, and correlated an analysis of a country's monetary and political situations then I could probably sell it for a nice chunk of change.
Lots of work, but probably huge pay off. Then again I'm not a "Data scientist" so I'll leave this up to those experts.
PS: you could definitely use this + gender detection for finding information about products and services and correlate that to corporate success of advertisements. Technology like this is applicable to many industries. Just looking for different correlations of the same sets of data.
Science fiction author and scientist/science writer Isaac Asimov popularized the term in his famous Foundation series of novels, though in his works the term psychohistory is used fictionally for a mathematical discipline that can be used to predict the general course of future history.
If you have data like payroll and bank account info (so, state-level hacking), it'd be interesting to see how economic pressures turn to uprisings. CIA/NSA probably has access to logs of all the world's telecom companies, I wonder if they can see trends of how e.g. riots grow organically (many mobile phones registering at particular antenna = huge crowd = riot (or a concert, or a football game...)), and to see who the instigators are.
Spambot. Contact someone over chat services, start an interesting conversation, then subtly promote a product.
More seriously, interview bots. Talk to people and ask them questions, turn them into a coherent whole. Let the elderly talk about their lives and record their stories, let people who have some problem they need solved talk about it so it can be turned into a succinct description, and so on.
Of course, it depends on whether hypothetical Turing test passing computers can do that. Let's just assume we'll ask contestants in a Turing test to do those things, then we know the winners can.
In the brief time between humanity's destruction and the Internet going down, Twitter and other social media will be just spambots re-tweeting each other. If we get that far, "AI" will be able to keep the Internet and the infrastructure it needs (power generation, power grid, actual cables) alive, and when aliens discover our planet, it will just find bots recycling the trending topics ad-infinitum.
The anti-spam bots are at a disadvantage because at some point in the arms race you have to make the bots actually fully intelligent, and then exposing them to spam 24/7 is torture and illegal. Spammers don't care about legal issues.
Also, possibly medical applications? Eliza (the first known chatbot) was built to simulate a Rogerian psychologist and was quite convincing for its time (1960s)...
What else would you use it for?
Edit: Corrected.
The main thing stopping me is NLP. Ideally, i want this offline only as i am unsure how much of my life i want to leave my home network.
I haven't started yet, I'd be grateful if you would be open to discussing on this topic :-)
So far I didn't find any useful stuff on the internet
For me, functionality of the assistant was fundamentally difficult. I could think of a dozen things i would like a home assistant to do, but most of them i don't want to program. Things like playing a song of spotify, changing the device spotify is playing on, and etc.
For me, what i was willing to program a bot to do was manage my personal server, take a load off of me. Check for updates, notify me about them, ensure backups are being triggered, etcetc.
At the moment i don't even have a bot though. I've taken many iterations on the literal programmatic API, and still don't have it quite right. I started in Go, and am now sitting in Rust (though not actively working on it). The difficulty, is i want to find a nice way to write a handler for an event. Eg, a web page visit is a single handler for a single event. However a bot response is not a single event. It's a conversation - so i'm trying to figure how to manage the state. This is my biggest point of internal struggle.
Anyway, if given what i've said above you're still interested, feel free to let me know if you'd like to talk more :)
Easy peasy. (Not really, but for an in-home piece of software, it doesn't seem too bad.)
The gulf between the smartest human being ever and the dumbest human being ever is not really that wide. It's just a small blip in the long line of intelligence progression. There is no reason why this point should be the limiting point of AI intelligence. It is very likely that the stable point of AI intelligence is far beyond human intelligence, from just the sheer quality of processing hardware that exists that is better than, or could become better than human hardware.
A chat bot that passes the Turing test is limited by whatever programming got it to that point.
Imagine you have a bot that convincingly passes the Turing test - what would you do with it?
Build a chatbot business? B2C or B2B?
Sell it to one of the big companies and if yes then how much do you think it would go for?
Give it to OpenAI? Open source it? If you answer yes to any of this questions, then why?
Edit: let me qualify - this would not be AGI, just a much more advanced bot than whatever is currently on the market.