One interesting corollary of this is that when it was announced in 2014 that the Turing test had been finally passed there was an understandable response from those same quarters that it was not possible for such an event to have occurred, presumably because we were still here in sterling health to both make and debate the pronouncement.

Unfortunately the assumed chain of events which means that passing the Turing test sounds the death knell for humanity appears to have become engrained in the thinking in certain quarters. What we do wish to dispel, however, is the assumption which links passing the Turing test with the achievement for machines of human-like or human-level intelligence. In this paper we do not wish to dispute the latter of these arguments, dramatic though it is. The direct consequence of this, as pointed out by Kurzweil and others, is that the singularity will be upon us, thereby resulting in the demise of the human race. There are those who believe that passing the Turing test means that human-level intelligence will have been achieved by machines.

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