Q1) Write a one paragraph describing the Turing test and another paragraph describing an argument against the Turing Test, known as the about the Chinese room.
The Turing test is a proposal for a test of a machine's ability to demonstrate intelligence. It was described by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," in which Turing considers the question "can machines think?" It proceeds as follows: a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine's intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen (Wikipedia, 2009).
One argument put forward against the Turing test came in 1980 from John Searle’s paper Minds, Brains and Programs. The argument was known ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment. Searle argued that software (such as ELIZA) could pass the Turing Test simply by manipulating symbols of which they had no understanding. Without understanding, they could not be described as "thinking" in the same sense people do. Therefore—Searle concludes—the Turing Test cannot prove that a machine can think, contrary to Turing's original proposal (Wikipedia, 2009).
Q3) Can virtual agents succeed in delivering high-quality customer service over the Web? Think of examples which support or disprove the question or just offer an opinion based on your personal experience.
I strongly believe that virtual agents can deliver a high-quality standard of customer service over the web. Although at the same time I also believe that this rarely happens. There is an attitude amongst society, that because you can not physically see and touch the person you are serving, that you do not need to be as efficient in delivering customer service as you would in the physical World. For example, there is a difference between sending out automated emails which are polite, professional and blandly informative but are an automated email that is used to answer every different question asked of an organisation. Sometimes all that changes is the personal details. High-quality customer service would be for the organisation to reply to the email with an individual response, which answers the questions or queries of the consumer without the consumer having to send 20 emails back and forth. This example is what can separate big business and small businesses.
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