Adam Curry

We propose T2 (Turing 2), a novel test for assessing possible latent awareness in machines and AI. Current AI models can mimic intelligent interaction without any established basis for concluding that they are genuinely sentient, thus posing a central challenge in determining the extent of AI progress toward something like consciousness. This challenge will require new heuristics—a new kind of Turing Test. T2 draws upon a subset of psi research called “presentiment,” which for several decades has demonstrated anomalous anticipatory responses to randomized stimuli in humans and other sentient biological lifeforms. The existence of anomalous anticipatory responses can be understood in terms of their utility to the organism, e.g. in conferring various adaptive advantages. The demonstration of presentiment by a machine or AI in a manner consistent with biological performance could indicate that it has achieved information processing capabilities beyond algorithmic determinism. In T2, a machine or AI participant must make a prediction or take an action before an event produced by a hardware random number generator, the output of which is impossible to predict. An incentive structure is established by which correct responses are rewarded (e.g. additional processing resources, tokens, etc) and/or incorrect responses are penalized (e.g. resource limitation, etc). Performance that exceeds a significance threshold (e.g. 0.05) on a sufficiently large trial set will have passed T2. Future iterations of the test should address known confounds in psi research specifically, such as series position (“decline”) effects, and psi-driven experimenter effects. We share two original experiments in which computer systems were built to test for presentiment responses, and evaluated in terms of T2. One of these, conducted at the University of Colorado, produced a six-sigma effect size.

Adam Curry is a tech inventor and co-founder of Entangled Labs, a psi research platform, and Bionatus, a boutique venture studio focused on AI, plasma, and frontier science.