Modern AI and an extended turing test

Bypassing somewhat the large controversy around it, we can say that the Turing test is a pragmatic one. That is, it is properly organized so that we may effectively answer the question, “can a machine think?” without necessarily being dragged into the hard questions of mind and consciousness that we have been grappling with for the past hundred years or so (and arguably longer). The test purports to answer this simple yet inconveniently nuanced question by proposing that if a machine can properly make a human believe it itself is human, then we may say and even believe that it in fact thinks. But, as one might expect when it comes to such a seismic matter, various forms of dissent have emerged from the idea that we may rightly say that some machine is a thinking thing.