hodgepodge sans analysis (Score 1)

This article really doesn't have that much to do with the Turing test for most of its extent. The point of the Turing test isn't merely that under some circumstances machines can be confused with humans. The whole point of the Turing test is that it takes something that we think is essential to being intelligent or being conscious, and has the machine replicating that exactly. Or at least, that's how Turing intended it. Building sophisticated mannequins doesn't cut it - hopefully no-one thinks that merely looking like a human being means that something is intelligent and/or conscious, no matter how good they look.

(if the automata Ishiguro has produced also answer students' questions intelligently, then the situation is different, and more like that of the original Turing test).

Similarly, what opponents humans like to play against doesn't really show us anything. If anything, it shows that Turing-like tests are unreliable because people tend to think that if it has a human face it's more 'interesting'.

The business with computers and war crimes simply begs the question. Certainly a computer that releases nuclear missiles in response to certain conditions is possible now - in fact, I'd be surprised if such a dead-man's switch doesn't exist already. But even though no person has pulled the switch doesn't mean that the computer is guilty of war crimes, any more than a car left in gear that runs over someone is guilty of a traffic violation. You need rationality and knowledge of consequences of actions to be guilty of anything. Note also that there's nothing about deceiving humans here, so I'm not really sure why this is even in the same article.

The only thing in here which comes close to something that sounds anything like intelligence (let alone consciousness) is the jazz-playing robot.

So it's a bit of a hodgepodge mess of completely different issues. It would be better (but less breathlessly exciting) to take out the stuff about war-crimes and any mention of the Turing test and call it 'computers with human faces' or something. At least then it would have a unified subject-matter.