Seasons

The robotic sentience question is purely academic at this point. A more relevant question along the same lines would be the issue of human cloning.

I think when a bot has reached the development when he actually responds like a human (whether sane or crazed) he has reached the "real" status.

Being able to respond like a human doesn't imply actual intelligence, though

Yeah, I know, I know, I know. But from a distance, who knows what it is? When can it be considered actual intelligence? At what point?

Shadyman, interesting, but disturbing point on the question. How good a bot is depends on how many people can it fool? Well, Eliza fools many outsiders who haven't seen it before. Yet she didn't fool me the first time. Nor do most bots.

Who does the fooling anyways? Is the bot doing it or does that honor belong to the cunning programmer? When a bot can depart from the rudeness of its script and invent totally new lines and intelligent rewrite its own programming (as opposed to the random rewrites that have been fobbed off as "creativity" before), then we can consider intelligence. The bot needs to be able to do this by itself.

Perhaps the question we should ask is how enjoyable is it to talk to the bot? How stimulating?

Ooh thought that one'd get y'all thinking. Well bots should be alowd to get as intelegent as is posible.

They aren't "intelligent". Merely mechanical and able to make selections from a list through a process of comparing.

We beg your pardon? We are intelligent.

So am I. Who you callin' stupid here? Is that what you're sayin' here? hm? hmm?

I've met intelligent people who were not enjoyable to talk to.

well, some bots SEEM more intelligent than some humans.

We should sometimes inquire about the intelligence of the questioner, too....