CONCEPT
The Garland Test
Anil Seth’s reframing of the classic AI consciousness test, named for filmmaker Alex Garland and his film Ex Machina: where the Turing test measures whether a machine can pass as human, the Garland test measures how easily a human attributes consciousness to something they know is a machine—and thereby measures human susceptibility, not machine capability.
The Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing in 1950, asks whether a machine can convince a human judge that it is human in open-ended conversation. The test has been criticized on many grounds, but its deepest problem is that it measures the wrong thing: it assesses the machine’s capacity for behavioral mimicry rather than the presence or absence of any inner life.
Anil Seth’s Garland test, named for Alex Garland and the 2014 film
Ex Machina, is a subtler and more revealing diagnostic. The Turing test asks: can the machine pass as human? The Garland test asks: what does it take to convince a human that a machine is conscious—even when the human knows it is a machine? The film’s drama turns on exactly this: a character who knows he is dealing with a robot is moved,