AI and the Future of Humanity - Modern Day Turing Test

Several months ago I collaborated with Dr Anthony 'Skip' Basiel to run an online workshop on AI and, in particular, a modern day update of the Turing test. Alan Turing is regarded by many as the “Godfather of AI” as back in the Second World War when he was very instrumental in the Bletchley Park Codebreakers that helped the UK to win the war, he predicted a time when computers would become so intelligent that if you asked a computer and a human the same question, you would not be able to tell which was human and which was the computer. This test was known as “The Turing Test”.

Today, I believe that we have gone well past that point with AI to a situation where you can tell the difference between an AI generated answer to a complex question and a human answer because the AI answer will be delivered much more quickly and comprehensively than a human could achieve.

For the workshop, recognising / believing that AI’s capabilities for generating creative content in text, sound/music and video also significantly exceed what humans could achieve, I created an updated version of the Turing test in which I asked whether people could tell the difference between AI generated words, music and video and human generation of the same story / message.

As an exercise, in the last 30 minutes, I asked AI to generate words and videos for 3 versions of the same storyline and I want to see how many people can tell which, if any, was written by a human and what is the likely author of the story?

AI Generated Text Version 1

The Last Invitation

It was the last evening of Dr. Thaddeus Pyrl’s mortal existence—a night crisp and peculiar, much as one might expect at the edge of Time’s great doorway. Though the air was filtered, and the sky no longer bore stars as men once knew them, there hung a curious stillness in the world—a pause, as if the Earth itself were drawing breath before a long exhalation.

Dr. Pyrl, now in the hundredth year of his being and by all accounts the architect of his own demise, stood beneath the glass canopy of his memory hall, a place bright with phosphor-lanterns and humming with the gentle strains of artificial violins. Around him, a small assembly of acquaintances—neither friends nor strangers—milled with delicacy. They had come not to mourn, but to witness: to offer polite toast to a man whose mind would, within twenty-four hours, no longer reside in any earthly frame.

The world had changed. Oh yes, it had changed terribly. The seas were risen, the forests cinder, and the old nations dissolved like sugar in stormwater. Humanity, now capable of living without end, had discovered the curse of endless consumption—each soul an engine with no off-switch. The World Council, in solemn consensus, had decreed a new covenant: at the age of one hundred, each citizen would surrender their physical form in favour of the Transfer to Immortality. There, in the Metaversal Haven, they might dwell forever in the echo of themselves, surrounded by dreams and memory, paired for eternity with the one they had truly loved.

And so, on this eve of recollection and parting, Thaddeus prepared for his own passage. The Transfer Room—a chamber most exquisite, shaped like an ivory sea-shell and lined with light—waited but a few paces away, behind velvet cords. It pulsed softly, as if breathing, or remembering.

A clock, grand and ancient in manner if not in function, stood nearby. It ticked toward midnight.

“Tell me, Doctor,” asked a thin man in a blue velvet frock—Ambrose Greeley, once a rival, now a curious onlooker—“are you not the least bit troubled? To let strangers decide who your eternal companion shall be?”

Thaddeus, whose eyes were lined with more wonder than age, smiled faintly. “Better strangers than my pride,” he said. “Let the world judge me. It always has.”

Just then, a hush fell upon the gathering. The lights flickered. Outside, beyond the filtered dome, the sky twisted with unnatural colour—orange, green, violet. Someone muttered of sunspots, solar flares, disturbances in the heliosheath. Others shrugged. There were always disturbances now.

But far below, deep within the Memory Vault, a process began that none had sanctioned. A file stirred, a routine awakened. There was movement in the code—stealthy, deliberate.

Thaddeus glanced toward the chamber door, his smile faltering.

The clock read: 11:56.

AI Generated Text Version 2

The Last Sunset

The soft hum of the dome’s climate regulation system was barely audible above the gentle laughter of the guests. Outside, the skies over what used to be central England were the colour of rusted copper—an atmospheric byproduct of the decades-long solar instability that had forced the last of the Earth's population into geodesic enclaves.

Inside the farewell chamber, warm light shimmered off glassware and glinted off silver-threaded garments. A circle of companions gathered around an old man who still stood tall despite his century of years. Dr. Eliot Voss, father of the Sentient Memory Architecture and the Transfer to Immortality Protocol, raised a glass of synthetic wine. His voice carried the weariness of wisdom but the clarity of a mind still fiercely alive.

“To friends, to memories, and to the beauty of knowing when to say goodbye,” Eliot said.

There were no tears—tears had become a luxury of earlier centuries, before emotion could be archived, indexed, and streamed.

The party unfolded beside the “Transfer Suite,” a circular chamber with walls of pulsing quantum light and a single reclining pod in the centre. At midnight, Eliot would enter the pod, and the Sentient Capture Engine would begin. Over 24 hours, every significant memory, emotion, and neural pathway would be mapped, digitised, and assembled into his Digital Twin—his eternal avatar in the Metaverse of Reunions.

The world had changed when Eliot unveiled the SMA technology. It allowed not only consciousness preservation, but also selective emotional filtering—a soul, curated. But progress had its price. With biological life expectancy now exceeding 150 years thanks to genomic therapy and nanorepair, Earth’s resources had long since tipped into deficit. The World Council had intervened. The hundred-year limit had been imposed. On paper, it was a celebration. In reality, it was euthanasia by elegy.

A chime sounded softly. Eleven-forty-five.

“Fifteen minutes,” murmured Kaia, Eliot’s closest companion of recent years, her voice tinged with something between admiration and sorrow. She was not eligible to join him in eternity—only one soul could be chosen. And that decision would be made not by Eliot, but by the global audience who would watch his memories unfold in real time.

Outside the dome, a faint ripple disturbed the electromagnetic shielding. A low tremor in the comms feed. The news channels whispered of a sunspot the size of Asia poised to erupt. A magnetic storm could compromise the SMA upload—a catastrophic event. No one dared speak of sabotage, but dissent had been growing. A small resistance movement saw Transfer as digital imprisonment, not liberation.

Eliot noticed a flicker of static in the Transfer Suite’s wall. Just for a second.

Kaia followed his gaze. “They said the solar flare’s trajectory is shifting. Could be harmless. Could disrupt everything.”

“I built this system to withstand solar storms,” Eliot said softly, but he didn’t sound certain.

At 11:59, the Transfer Suite doors opened. Eliot stepped forward, his silhouette outlined in quantum shimmer. The guests fell silent.

As he lay back in the pod, his eyes closed, the last words spoken aloud by a mortal voice escaped his lips:

“Let memory be my guide… and love, my destination.”

The countdown began.

AI Generated Text Version 3

The Last Night

It was a still, crystalline evening on the island of Orkys—a synthetic haven moored off the coast of what had once been Scotland. Stars shimmered in the cooled upper atmosphere, as if reluctant to blink above a world that had long since ceased to be natural. Inside the domed estate perched on the island’s highest promontory, a quiet farewell gathering was underway.

Dr. Elias Arden, the architect of immortality, stood in the center of the room, framed by the soft silver glow of the “Transfer to Immortality” chamber that pulsed quietly behind him. The chamber was smooth and ovoid, humming with readiness. It resembled a pearl grown in steel, more artifact than machine. Tomorrow, it would receive its first passenger: him.

At ninety-nine years and three hundred sixty-five days, Elias was spry by any century’s measure, a walking contradiction of age and vitality. But it was not his body that would endure. His digital twin—the painstakingly constructed AI echo of his personality, memories, intuition, and emotional nuance—would awaken at midnight tomorrow. Then, after a final immersive re-experiencing of his hundred years, his virtual self would step into the Metaverse Sanctuary: a post-biological realm of consciousness where every departed centenarian was promised eternal presence—together with the one person they had loved above all.

The farewell gathering was modest. A handful of companions, mostly colleagues from the golden era of human-machine convergence, sipped spiced synth-wine and watched as Elias adjusted a projection of his boyhood home—part of the interface that would guide him through his final Memory Day. There was warmth and nostalgia, but underneath it all, a tension hovered like static before a storm.

“You really trust the transfer protocol will hold?” asked Mira Tenjou, an old confidante and once, briefly, something more. She wore the expression of someone who had read too many bad lines of code and seen too many perfect systems fail.

Elias smiled. “I built it to survive entropy itself. But if it doesn’t, I won’t be around to complain.”

There was polite laughter, but the air had shifted. Outside the dome, winds picked up slightly. The auroras intensified—green and violet serpents writhing across the sky.

In the control room adjacent to the transfer chamber, a technician frowned at a flickering panel. “Geomagnetic spike just registered,” she murmured. “Solar telemetry shows increased activity. Not critical, but... unusual.”

In a secure server bank thousands of kilometers away, a silent process stirred. An unauthorised thread had activated inside the global mindstream—code not written by Elias, not approved by the World Council.

By 23:53, the guests had departed. Elias was alone now. He stood before the chamber, one hand resting gently on its polished surface. On the wall, a countdown glowed: 00:06:42.

“I wonder,” he whispered to himself, “who she’ll be. The love of my life.”

He hadn’t chosen. The algorithm, fed by billions of memory-points, psychometric traces, and audience sentiment, would reveal the truth.

Outside, the auroras flared brighter than ever.

And somewhere deep in the sun, something stirred.

There is significant disagreement about whether AI has gone beyond what Alan Turing envisioned depending on how you define intelligence and what would be the implications of an artificial intelligence superior to human intelligence. On one hand, if you asked AI to complete a task normally carried out be a knowledge professional (e.g. writing a story and creating a compelling video like the examples above), it is certain that AI would be able to do in minutes what a human might take days to do. In the field of creative content creation, AI can generate results far faster and cheaper than humans – which is at the heart of recent conflicts around the use of AI in the film and music industries.

On the other hand, having an interactive conversation with AI similar in nature to human conversations might reveal some limitations of AI in its ability to mimic human behaviour. However, in my opinion, the current state of AI and enabling technologies has evolved to the point that it presents a real danger to the future of humanity and is likely to cause even more social unrest and conflict than the First Industrial Revolution.

Readers might be interested in trying to guess which stories were created by a human and the identity/style of the author.

David Wortley FRSA IORMA May 2025