文档介绍：1 Can Machines Think ?
Much has beenwritten about the Turing test in the last few years, someof
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it preposterouslyoff the mark. Peopletypically mis he test by orders
of magnitude. This essayis an anndote, a prosthesisfor the imagination,
showing how huge the task posedby the Turing test is, and hencehow unlikely
it is that puterwill ever passit . It doesnot go far enoughin
the imaginanon-enhancementdepartment , however, and I have updatedthe
essaywith a new postscript.
Can machines think ? This has been a conundrum for philosophers for
years, but in their fascination with the pure conceptual issues they have
for the most part overlooked the real social importance of the answer.
It is of more than academic importance that we learn to think clearly
about the actual cognitive powers puters, for they are now being
introduced into a variety of sensitive social roles, where their powers
will be put to the ultimate test: In a wide variety of areas, we are on
the verge of making ourselves dependent upon their cognitive powers.
The cost of overestimating them could be enormous.
One of the principal inventors of puter was the great British
mathematician Alan Turing . It was he who first figured out, in highly
abstract terms, how to design a puting device-
what we now call a universal Turing machine. All puters
in use today are in essenceTuring machines. Over thirty years
ago, at the dawn of puter age, Turing began a classic article,
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Computing Machinery and Intelligence with the words : 1 propose
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to consider the question, Can machines think ? - but then went on
to say this was a bad question, a question that leads only to sterile
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debate and haggling over definitions , a question, ashe put it, too mean-
Brainchildren
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ingless to deserve discussion (Turing, 1950). In its place he substituted
what he took to be a much better question, a question that would be
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crisply answerable and intuitively satisfying in e