> What it won't do is matter to YOU. Because you're a human and humans will keep moving the bar to a higher standard right? When AI shot passed the turing test humans just moved the goal posts. So to convince someone like YOU we have to look at the final metric.

It is disappointing to see you descending into something of a rant here. If you knew me better, you would know that I spend more time debating in opposition to people who think they can prove that AGI/artificial consciousness is impossible than I do with people who think it is already an undeniable fact that it has already been achieved (though this discussion is shifting the balance towards the middle, if only briefly.) Just because I approach arguments in either direction with a degree of skepticism and I don't see any value in trying to call the arrival of true AGI at the very first moment it occurs, it does not mean that I'm trying (whether secretly or openly) to deny that it is possible either in the near-term or at all. FWIW, I regard the former as possible and the latter highly probable, so long as we don't self-destruct first.

> Nothing on the face of the earth can address the question. Because nobody truly knows what "understanding" something actually is. You can't even articulate the definition in a formal way such that it can be dictated on a computer program.

The anti-AI folk I mentioned above would willingly embrace this position! They would say that it shows that human-like intelligence and consciousness lies outside of the scope of the physical sciences, and that this creates the possibility of a type of p-zombie that is indistinguishable by physical science from a human and yet lacks any concept of itself as an entity within an external world.

More relevantly, your response here repeats an earlier fallacy. In practice, concepts and their definitions are revised, tightened, remixed and refined as we inquire into them and gain knowledge. I know you don't agree, but as this is not an opinion but an empirical observation, validated by many cases in the history of science and science-like disciplines, I don't see you prevailing here - and there's the knowledge-bootstrap problem if this were not the case, as well.

It occurred to me this morning that there's a variant or extension of the quantitative Turing test which goes like this:

We have two agents and a judge. The judge is a human and the agents are either a pair of humans, a pair of AIs, or one of each, chosen randomly and without the judge being unaware of the mix. One of the agents is picked, by random choice, to start a discussion with the other with the intent of exploring what the other understands about some topic, with the discussion-starter being given the freedom to choose the topic. The discussion proceeds for a reasonable length of time - let's say one hour.

The judge follows the discussion but does not participate in it. At the conclusion of the discussion, the judge is required to say, for each agent, whether it is more likely that it is a human or AI, and the accuracy of this call is used to assign a categorical variable to the result, just as in the version of the Turing test you have described.

This seems just as quantitative, and in the same way, as your version, yet there's no reason to believe it will necessarily yield the same results. More tests are better, so what's not to like?