The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
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"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
"The human mind is an emergent property of the brain."
"If it is accepted that real brains, as found in animals, and in particular in men, are a sort of machine it will follow that our digital computer suitably programmed, will behave like a brain..."
"The human mind is capable of doing many things that a machine cannot, but a machine can do many things that a human cannot."
"The human brain is a biological computer."
From his seminal paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', published in the journal Mind, Volume 59, No. 236, pp. 433-460.
Date: 1950
PhilosophicalFound in 1 providers: gemini
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Asking whether machines can truly 'think' is a poorly framed question because the word 'think' lacks a precise definition. Rather than debating semantics, what matters is whether machines can behave in ways indistinguishable from thinking. Over time, language and understanding will shift until attributing thought to machines becomes unremarkable and accepted rather than controversial.
Turing designed the Imitation Game — now called the Turing Test — specifically to sidestep unanswerable philosophical questions about consciousness. As a mathematician and logician, he trusted behavioral evidence over metaphysical debate. Having built Colossus-era computing machinery and conceptualized the universal machine, he had firsthand confidence that mechanical intelligence was not just possible but inevitable.
Written in 1950, this appeared in Turing's landmark paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' during the earliest days of electronic computing. ENIAC was only four years old. Most scientists dismissed machine cognition as absurd. Cold War pressure was accelerating computation research, yet public understanding of computers was near zero, making Turing's century-scale optimism genuinely radical for its time.
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