Screen Testing

How do you measure humanity? We go deep into spoilers for Ex Machina as we recap Bluebook's work to produce a robot that can pass as a human. In a reference-filled episode, we talk about the challenges of passing (or manipulating) a Turing Test, we debate the ethics of creating sentient machines, and compare the "planning/interview/debrief" structure of the film against how we approach our testing sessions. As we proceed, we get distracted by discussions about the capabilities of helicopters, we wonder how a CEO can run a business from a location with no mobile coverage, investigate whether Nathan has already succeeded in creating the perfect dancing robot, and discover a film connection which sends Dan into uncontrollable laughter. We also subject Siri and Google Home to their own Turing Test. It doesn't go well. Testing conferences and initiatives mentioned during the introduction: Neil's blog post about TestBash Brighton 2017 Brighton tester meetup - 19 April (where Dan presented this week) Brighton te