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Intelligent Machinery
Alan Turing is widely considered one of the fathers of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence yet probably better known for his contributions to decoding encrypted messages during world war II. Today we’ll take a look at one of his papers ( Intelligent Machinery ) to see how things have aged since those days ( 3/4 of a century has passed ! )…In short in some regards great and in others not so much.
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⚠️ The original text can be found online if you wish to follow along.
Introduction
The paper concerns itself with machinery that might show intelligent behavior, we now call these machine AIs or simply computer programs…
Paraphrasing the thesis can be summed by the argument: "Human level intelligence can only be achieved if adequate training is provided."
We unfortunately need to be critical and so the main problem with this argument is that Turing is both right and wrong about learning and intelligence:
It is true ( or most likely ) you need learning for intelligence, but it is not encompassing of everything we currently understand constitutes intelligence ( never mind consciousness/human intelligence). It’s like saying car level locomotion can only be achieved through the use of tires or some other analog mechanism, sure, but wouldn’t you also need an engine, seats, an enclosure ?
Regardless of criticism, AI currently lives in a place where learning is everything and has proven to be quite useful, there’s still some ways to go for something like Artificial General Intelligence or human level intelligence though, and that’s why revisiting Turing is important as we stand where he once stood, maybe a bit higher but still facing a seemingly impossible task.
Darker times. Intelligent Machinery was written on or about 1948 and Turing was under heavy NDAs from his military work, he would die in 1954 without the paper being published in his lifetime, so understandably he starts by defending the study and creation of AIs, something that to us could seem unnecessary, but not in any way a fault of Mr. Turing as those were morally…
