As technology advances man strives to be more advanced, more like the machine. Parallel, machine becomes more man-like. Mechanical assembly lines replace the need for low-wage factory works, precise laser wielding robots perform surgeries and autonomous weapons take the guilt out of mass murder on the battlefield. As machines become smarter the quintessential question, the quality that secures man reigning supreme remains, can machines think?
While movies like Artificial Intelligence and I Robot tantalized the imaginations of viewers, a real life experiment explored this question in 1950. Budding English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and theoretical biologist Alan Turing performed what is now known as the Turing Tests. Based on the Intimidation Game from the Victorian Era, Turing tried to see if an interrogator could differentiate between two subjects based solely on their answers to a series of questions. One subject a computer, and one a human.
Perhaps you have heard of the popular fork in the road riddle which also manifested in the movie Labyrinth starring the late David Bowie. As you are venturing down a road one path leads you to the village of truth tellers and the other to the village of cannibals.
At the fork you meet two twin brothers, each from one of the villages respectively, therefore one is a liar and one is not. One will try to deceive you and one will try to help you. The exact same premise went for the Turing Test; the infantile computer would try to trick the interrogator while the human would try to help him.
“The form in which we have set the problem reflects this fact in the condition which prevents the interrogator from seeing or touching the other competitors, or hearing -their voices,” said Tuning in the journal which published his findings. “Some other advantages of the proposed criterion may be shown up by specimen questions and answers.”
As primitive as the computing system was, it could still answer advanced addition equations in about half a minute and questions about chess moves in half that time. But a question on composing a simple sonnet it could not answer. For the human, the inverse was true, therefore, making the test on the part of the interrogator quite easy.
Turing held then, and even to a degree now, controversial stance that machines could possibly be capable of thinking and even achieve consciousness. This was contrary to his contemporary Professor Jefferson, whose Lister Oration for 1949 he quoted in part to highlight the opposing view.
"Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain-that is, not only write it, but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants."
Turing even went as far as questioning the theological opponent of machines being able to think in particular, the lacking of a soul. The following is an excerpt of his reasoning:
“I am unable to accept any part of this, but will attempt to reply in theological terms. I should find the argument more convincing if animals were classed with men, for there is a greater difference, to my mind, between the typical animate and the inanimate than there is between man and the other animals. The arbitrary character of the orthodox view becomes clearer if we consider how it might appear to a member of some other religious community. How do Christians regard the Muslim view that women have no souls? But let us leave this point aside and return to the main argument. It appears to me that the argument quoted above implies a serious restriction of the omnipotence of the Almighty.
It is admitted that there are certain things that He cannot do such as making one equal to two, but should we not believe that He has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if He sees fit? We might expect that He would only exercise this power in conjunction with a mutation which provided the elephant with an appropriately improved brain to minister to the needs of this sort.
An argument of exactly similar form may be made for the case of machines. It may seem different because it is more difficult to "swallow." But this really only means that we think it would be less likely that He would consider the circumstances suitable for conferring a soul. The circumstances in question are discussed in the rest of this paper. In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.
However, this is mere speculation. I am not very impressed with theological arguments whatever they may be used to support. Such arguments have often been found unsatisfactory in the past. In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, "And the sun stood still . . . and hasted not to go down about a whole day" (Joshua x. 13) and "He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should not move at any time" (Psalm cv. 5) were an adequate refutation of the Copernican theory. With our present knowledge such an argument appears futile. When that knowledge was not available it made a quite different impression.”
Turing theorized that by the year 2000 the interrogator would have 70 percent less chance of being able to identify the man from the computer. While no artificial intelligence, a term not coined until 1956, has ever done as well on the test as Turing had thought computers have made strides to defeat their human counterparts.
In 1997 the IBM Deep Blue defeated the then world champion Gary Kasparov at chess. In 2011 the IBM computer Watson defeated the longest running human Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings live on TV. Although Turing died only four years after the test results were published, he would definitely be pleased to see these defeats.
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