But he discarded the question “Can machines think?” The act of thinking is, he argued, too difficult to define. In his 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, published six years before the term “artificial intelligence” was coined, the British computer scientist Alan Turing considered the capacity of computers to imitate the human intellect. The most famous effort to measure machine intelligence does not resolve these questions instead, it obscures them. If the ability to carry out complex arithmetic and algebra is a sign of intellect, then is a digital calculator, in some sense, gifted? If spatial reasoning is part of the story, then is a robot vacuum cleaner that’s capable of navigating its way around a building unaided something of a wunderkind? If we did, we might discover a problem tucked inside it: defining intelligence is far from straightforward. AI is an idea so commonplace that few of us bother to interrogate its meaning.
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