Turing test their cars, ascribe desire and intentions to natural forces (e.g., "nature abhors a vacuum"), and worship the sun as a human-like being with intelligence. If the Turing test is applied to religious objects, Shermer argues, then, that inanimate statues, rocks, and places have consistently passed the test throughout history. This human tendency towards anthropomorphism effectively lowers the bar for the Turing test, unless interrogators are specifically trained to avoid it. One interesting feature of the Turing test is the frequency of the confederate effect, when the confederate (tested) humans are misidentified by the interrogators as machines. It has been suggested
Turing test plausible by contemporary researchers in artificial intelligence. In a 2008 paper submitted to 19th Midwest Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science Conference, Dr. Shane T. Mueller predicted a modified Turing test called a "Cognitive Decathlon" could be accomplished within five years. By extrapolating an exponential growth of technology over several decades, futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that Turing test-capable computers would be manufactured in the near future. In 1990, he set the year around 2020. By 2005, he had revised his estimate to 2029. The Long Bet Project Bet Nr. 1 is a wager of $20,000 between Mitch Kapor (pessimist) and Ray