In the 1940s and 50s, when a handful of computers existed, some visionary scientists speculated that computers might compete with human beings’ thinking capacity. Although this is yet to be fully achieved, a lot of transformation has taken place to the computer that once filled a room. Miniature devices such as smartphones and tablets have replaced the gigantic machines, and the processing power of the computer today is incredible (Parsons, 2016). Computers have become part of our everyday lives, and scientists have continued enhancing their computing power through Artificial Intelligence (AI) research.
I think the Turing Test is an adequate measure of true machine intelligence. This is because the test involves asking a computer and a human being a question, and a judge should distinguish the answers by telling which one belongs to the human and computer. If the judge fails to tell the difference, it implies that computers’ AI has rivaled human intelligence. An example where computer AI has outshined human beings is in the chess game where it beat the grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. In 2011, a computer defeated a tag-team of two quiz masters in the jeopardy game. However, there are still many situations where computer AI responses are still off from the expected answers, especially if the questions posed are not in a particular format (Parsons, 2016). Based on the Turing test, AI is yet to rival human intelligence because their responses are not the same.
I believe that computers will one day have the capacity to think because scientists are still researching additional programming that will enable computers to learn like human beings. This will allow computers to be more dynamic, meaning they will understand and answer diverse questions without expecting a particular format to be used. Considering Ray Kurzweil’s prediction, AI will be a thousand times smarter than humans by the time this debate of whether computers can think ends (Parsons, 2016). Ray also says that this will be to humans’ advantage because they will merge their intelligence with AI, and the outcome will be phenomenal and fascinating.
Reference
Parsons, J. J. (2016). New perspectives computer concepts 2016 (19th ed.). Cengage Learning.