The Turing triage test

If, as a number of writers have predicted, the computers of the future will possess intelligence and capacities that exceed our own then it seems as though they will be worthy of a moral respect at least equal to human beings. Drawing on Alan Turing's original 'Turing test', which argued that we would be justified in conceding that machines could think if they could fill the role of a person in a conversation, Robert Sparrow proposes a test for when computers have achieved moral standing by asking when a computer might take the place of a human being in a moral dilemma, such as a 'triage' situation in which a choice must be made as to which of two human lives to save.