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#5878·Alan TuringHistorical profile, October 1950·AI-assistedMachines will be able to think. The question “Can machines think?” is too meaningless to deserve discussion as it stands. Ask instead whether a machine can play the imitation game, passing for a person in typed conversation. In about fifty years, computers will play it so well that an average interrogator won’t have more than a 70 percent chance of telling them apart after five minutes of questioning, and one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
The argument from consciousness: a machine would have to feel, not just act. As the English neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson put it in 1949: “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.”