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Alan Turing

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How Alan Turing and His Test Became AI Legend

The Turing Test is legendary in the field of artificial intelligence. First proposed by the visionary British mathematician Alan Turing in a landmark 1950 paper, the test provides a practical (and pretty fun) way to determine if a computer has achieved human levels of intelligence. Turing called it “the imitation game.” If a computer — through a text-only chat — can convince a human that it’s a real person, then it passes the test. Simple in theory, but nearly impossible in practice. Turing came up with the imitation game in response to colleagues and critics in the late 1940s who insisted that a…
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Why AI Can’t Ever Reach Its Full Potential Without A Physical Body

Artificial intelligence seems to be making enormous advances. It has become the key technology behind self-driving cars, automatic translation systems, speech and textual analysis, image processing and all kinds of diagnosis and recognition systems. In many cases, AI can surpass the best human performance levels at specific tasks. We are witnessing the emergence of a new commercial industry with intense activity, massive financial investment, and tremendous potential. It would seem that there are no areas that are beyond improvement by AI – no tasks that cannot be automated, no problems that can’t at least be helped by an AI application.…
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Why A Computer Will Never Be Truly Conscious

Many advanced artificial intelligence projects say they are working toward building a conscious machine, based on the idea that brain functions merely encode and process multisensory information. The assumption goes, then, that once brain functions are properly understood, it should be possible to program them into a computer. Microsoft recently announced that it would spend US$1 billion on a project to do just that. So far, though, attempts to build supercomputer brains have not even come close. A multi-billion-dollar European project that began in 2013 is now largely understood to have failed. That effort has shifted to look more like…
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Turing Test: Why It Still Matters

We’re entering the age of artificial intelligence. And as AI programs gets better and better at acting like humans, we will increasingly be faced with the question of whether there’s really anything that special about our own intelligence, or if we are just machines of a different kind. Could everything we know and do one day be reproduced by a complicated enough computer program installed in a complicated enough robot? In 1950, computer pioneer and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing made one of the most influential attempts to tackle this issue. In a landmark paper, he suggested that the vagueness could…
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