As part of our blog series around the Future of Biometric Access Control, this article will look at a possible future scenario that might have seemed like a science fiction story in the past but might not be so improbable anymore: AI or robots imitating humans.
The Turing Test
The Turing Test (or The Imitation Game) was proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. The idea of the test was to evaluate whether a machine could exhibit behaviour that was indistinguishable from a real human. A human would have a text conversation via keyboard and screen, with both a real human and a machine. After their responses, if the human evaluator could not reliably conclude which was the machine and which was the human, the machine would pass.
Since 2025, AI (specifically ChatGPT versions GPT-4 and GPT-4.5) has been shown to pass the Turing Test in blind studies. It has been argued that since its inception, the Turing Test has become less relevant as it only proves that a machine can imitate a human, and is not a measure of humanity, consciousness, or true understanding.
At the time, the Turing Test was a philosophical exploration of the nature of a 'thinking machine'; however, it has since become a key inspiration for many cyber security protections that are used every day.
CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA
The Turing Test exists today in cyberspace, as webpages prevent improper use or access by web-scraping bots with CAPTCHA. CAPTCHA is a contrived acronym for 'Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'. These tests are designed to be easy for humans but challenging for computers. There are several types of tests such as correctly typing blurry and warped text characters, picking out specific images from a grid, or solving simple maths problems.
Unlike CAPTCHA, a reCAPTCHA is largely automated and invisible to the user, which tracks things like input delay, mouse movement, and keystroke patterns to determine if the website visitor is a human. A reCAPTCHA is considered a more accessible protective tool, as the challenges do not require interaction and bypass issues a human with impaired vision or hearing might have.
Tools like this prove that automated attempts to access data is already a problem, with CAPTCHA itself being invented in 1997.
Human-like robots and their biometrics
Science fiction authors have posed incredible questions and sparked debate about the very essence of humanity for well over 100 years. Many of these stories, ideas, and themes have been adapted into hugely successful multimedia franchises.
One of the most iconic is the Blade Runner universe. In a futuristic world, humans and synthetic humans (replicants) are nearly indistinguishable. The replicants are bioengineered to be superhumanly strong and intelligent but are created purely to work on Earth's hazardous space colonies as slave labour. They are illegal on Earth due to a violent uprising against their treatment, but it is difficult to identify them among the human population. The only reliable method of identification is a test known as the fictional 'Voight-Kampff' test (inspired by the Turing Test), a machine which gauges emotional responses to the questions that are asked. The main character Deckard (Harrison Ford) explains that a replicant can usually be detected after 20 to 30 questions, however another replicant he questions takes over 100 questions, but this is a special case.
Two other iconic franchises which feature robots designed for infiltrating human society are the Terminator series and the 2004 reboot of 'Battlestar Galactica'. In essence, by emulating the appearance and behaviour of humans, they attempt to gain trust or access things their outwardly robotic counterparts would never be able to do without detection. The access control and biometric checks required for these science fiction futures would need to be equally improved to match.
While these are all hyper-stylized and often apocalyptic depictions of the future, they all contemplate the problems involved with discerning between real humans and robots who pretend to be, act or even believe they are human.
What might the future look like?
In all these hypothetical futures, both imagined and realistic, the principles of authentication and security are still applicable, and pose interesting questions about how access control and biometric credentials need to adapt and respond to increasingly human chatbots and robots, in both physical and digital spaces.
Biometric data will likely be the deciding factor to prove true authenticity as a human being, the imperfections and irregularities that make everyone unique being the only way to truly determine the correct subject to have access.
That future may not be here (yet!) but Tensor can provide cutting-edge Access Control systems to suit any requirements in the present — book a free demo and discuss your needs.