I thought that the ideas in the reading about being able to test a robot on "humanity" was interesting, but I have to disagree somewhat about it. For one thing, what really makes a human different from a robot that can pass the test? We really draw the line by deciding what is alive, but people have always strugled with finding a good definition of "life". An adaptive, reproducing machine could furfil all of the requirments that are conventionally included in the defenition of life. However, even beyond this, what is the difference between simulating the type of thought that makes us human and actually posessing this thought? Maybe we just "simulate" thought extremely well, to the point of not being able to distinguish it from "real" thought. And isn't assigning meaningfullness to "humanity" rather arbitrary. For example, some apes that do sign language might exibit more evidence of inteligence than newborn babies, so how do we diffine which of these are human? Furthermore, maybe computers are actually more "advanced" than humans. It is possible that, a some time in this millennium, we will develop a computer that will be indistinguishable (mentally) from a human, but no human could replicate the comutational abilities of supercomputers- even a prodigy. And what if- by observing minor indicators in voice, facial positions, gestures, etc, a computer was better than determining if a human was lying than a biological human- than the test might just be useless.