I can think of no better test of whether some specific being is intelligent than fooling another human into thinking they are.
Can you think of a better one?
> because it's a behavioral or functional test
What else would you test for in an AI other than its output and behavior? Conversely: how would you test a human for intelligence other than through its output and behavior?
Surely that depends upon the human? An infant would do a terrible job. An institutionalized vegetable would fail to provide meaningful information.
A not-very-bright cousin of mine has been heard responding to robo-calls. Would his opinion do?
I think 'intelligence' is ambiguous, but many parts of it can be measured to some degree. Lets give the AI the SAT test perhaps? Or a test of hypothetical arguments. Or ask it how it would tell if you were an intelligent being yourself. Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'.
We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance.
> Anything that's even a little bit 'meta' would confound most 'AIs'.
This is precisely why the Turing Test is so tricky for machines. Knowing the parameters, any regular human could test even the most advanced present-day AI and reveal it as a machine with very little effort and only a few questions.
> We can tell if an AI is functional in some environment or responds well to social queues by interacting with it. But not much else. Not how 'intelligent' it is for instance.
The Turing Test does not intend to determine level of intelligence (it's not an IQ test). It is intended to determine whether the intelligence you're interacting with is advanced enough to fool you into thinking they are of human nature.
It is not a test of degree of intelligence, but rather of its nature. Human / not human are the only two possible outcomes.
That last bit is a false equivalence - we have no way with current science to truly introspect the "thought process" of another human, so functional judgment is the only kind we can exercise.
With AI - we built it. We can read the code that's running. We can make a distinction, in cases where output or behavior is identical, whether it's a neural network or a 12-million-line switch statement - and that value judgment means something to our determination of intelligence. There are plenty of ways other than (or in addition to) output to determine the "intelligence" of a machine that we simply can't exercise with other people.
Can you think of a better one?
> because it's a behavioral or functional test
What else would you test for in an AI other than its output and behavior? Conversely: how would you test a human for intelligence other than through its output and behavior?