> Why should we take it as our goal to build something which is just like us? A dog would never win any imitation game; but there seems to be no doubt that dogs exhibit cognition, and a machine with the cognitive and communicative abilities of a dog would be an interesting challenge for AI (and might usefully be incorporated, for example, into automobiles.)

This is such a good point.

After all it's called the "imitation game" -- is it really about AI? It seems like this is the kind of grand theory which harms actual research and development: instead of gaining theory from experience, we get our experience to conform to a pre-set theory -- this is a top-down approach when, in fields of science and engineering, we rather might agree to a bottom-up design (to some degree, obviously).