We all remember the famous Voight-Kampff test using in ‘Blade Runner’ to determine if an individual was a replicant or not. The polygraph machine measured bodily functions such as respiration, heart rate, blushing and eye movement in response to emotionally provocative questions.

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Well, if you ever find yourself in a situation when you need to figure out if you’re dealing with artificial intelligence or a human (this might not seem so absurd in the near future) then these questions will act as your own little Voight-Kampff test. They’ve been designed to confuse and cause you to think rather than calculate – which of course at the moment, AI bots are unable to do. A machine would likely have a large library of facts so you could expect them to do well on knowledge-based questions from a variety of topics. If you asked the conversation partner trivial questions that essentially ask for knowledge from disparate fields to be combined repeatedly, the individual would be less likely to be human the more knowledge they display.

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With this idea in mind, here are several questions you could ask that should help you to decipher if the subject is a bot or a person:

I have many religious friends too, do you know a lot about religion, if so, which religions do you know about?

This statement is false. Was the preceding statement true?

Can you explain to me why time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana?

It’s lamentable to see so many people die in wars around the world, politicians do not care enough, that’s why wars are not resolved peacefully. Why would you agree or disagree?

What was the most recent movie you saw? Oh that was a good one. Did you like the bit where [thing that didn’t happen]?

How does it feel to touch a lover?

What’s your relationship like with your parents?

Could you rephrase that?

Can you determine Pi to the 100th decimal place? (If you get a quick answer, it’s a Bot.)

What simple questions would you ask me to determine if I am human or AI?

Curveball at the end. Of course, these aren’t guaranteed to help you decide what’s what, but with the current level of AI sophistication, I would be confident that a few of these would work. Who knows how much harder it will be in decades to come? Maybe AI will be trying to figure out if we’re the human or the bot.

To read about the theory that claims we’re all living in a computer simulation, click HERE.