“Can machines think?”, the notion of Artificial Intelligence was first, seriously, contemplated by Alan Turing; considered by many as the ‘father of computer science’. At first glance, especially at the time this question was first asked, one might dismiss it quickly – how can it be possible for a machine to think, they simply do what they are programmed to do.
Picasso himself said “Computers are useless…They can only give you answers”, however as argued by Domingos, in his book The Master Algorithm, “Computers aren’t supposed to be creative; they’re supposed to do what you tell them to. If what you tell them to is be creative, you get machine learning.” At present artificial intelligence is a popular topic of discussion in the tech community, with companies like Google investing billions of dollars into research. However, with all of this discussion the notion of a ‘technological singularity’ has been raised. A singularity is defined in the Oxford dictionary as: “A point at which a function takes an infinite value, especially in space–time when matter is infinitely dense, such as at the centre of a black hole”. A technological singularity, however, refers to the hypothesis that the creation of artificial superintelligence and other various technologies will result in a fundamental change in human civilization.
At one point in time it was certainly true that computers did not know anything that humans were not already aware of, a computer’s ‘mind’ consisted only of code written painstakingly by a computer programmer, therefore insinuating that the computer could be no more ‘intelligent’ than the one who programme it. Even if the computer was able to perform complex calculations with near perfect accuracy, can it be considered intelligent if it cannot perform any other tasks? Turing provided us with one way we can measure intelligence of a computer in his paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. The Imitation Game, more widely known now as the Turing Test involves three players, an interrogator, a machine and a human. The interrogator must converse with the two other players (via a keyboard and monitor) and determine which is human and which is a machine while the human and machine both try to convince the interrogator that they are in fact the other player (the human is the machine and vice versa). If the computer is able to trick the interrogator it has passed the test and, according to Turing, is an example of artificial intelligence. In designing this test it is clear that in Turing’s opinion, the ability to think was shown not by ‘giving correct answers, but responsive ones’, an example of this is given by Turing:
“Q: Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge.
A: Count me out on this one. I never could write poetry.”
In this example the computer states that it is unable to write poetry, not just sonnets in particular, to make this connection it is possible that the computer would have had to ‘think’ rather than simply reusing the words spoken by the interrogator.
There are, however, criticisms of this measure of intelligence; it assumes that the only valuable form of Artificial Intelligence is one that emulates human intelligence as closely as possible, rather than to speculate the idea of another form of intelligence. There is also a counter to this, as humans are the only highly intelligent species we have come across we can only make comparisons to human intelligence when trying decide what we deem intelligent.
When research into artificial intelligence first began it was proposed that a computer could be deemed superintelligent if it was able to beat humans at something that required the highest level of human intelligence; in the 1950s it was decided that this was chess, as several experts stated “If one could devise a successful chess machine, one would seem to have penetrated to the core of human endeavour” In fact this was not the case, creating a computer that played chess to a superhuman level was much simpler than previously thought and was achieved in May 1997 as Gary Kasparov, world chess champion, was defeated IBM’s Deep Blue.