I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’
– Alan Turing
In ordinary parlance, we often say of an uncommonly intelligent person: “So and so is like a computer.” But at the story’s beginning, it was the other way round. The challenge was to build a machine that could be like a human in the most elementary aspect possible: think, for instance. Even if not deeply, like Rodin’s Le Penseur, at least like a dew-fresh two-year-old. It still is, arguably, quite the unbreachable frontier. That deceptively simple question up there was posed, almost like a whisper that would set off a storm, by a tragic and enigmatic figure now universally seen to have founded both computer science and Artificial Intelligence (AI)—the British mathematician Alan Turing. Set out in his seminal 1950 paper in Mind, the idea of proving that a mechanical device could, even hypothetically, think like a human was as profoundly unsettling as it was exhilarating—for philosophers and...
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