Douglas Hofstadter (1985), 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test', in Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern, (first written in 1981), New York: Basic Books, pp. 492-525. <http://www.cs.unr.edu/~sushil/class/ai/papers/coffeehouse.html>

Hofstadter's 'A Coffee House Conversation on the Turing Test' (1985) is one text amongst many that is skeptical about the claims of artificial intelligence. In conversational form, it describes the richness of human imagination and emotions against the mechanicist promises of AI. In this way, the Turing Test would seem to prove that machines could do a very good job of simulating thinking but not do thinking as such. The two protagonists of the conversation argue about these ideas and generally agree that our received view of computing is far too fixed and needs to be messier - to include the mechanisms of DNA and enzymes - from the 'mechanical level of molecules to the living level of cells'. Indeed, 'There are so many complexities and rich modes of behavior that all that mechanicalness adds up to something very fluid' (1985). This is when, at some point in the future, 'real artificial intelligence' might emerge. 
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