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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 continuity in the nervous system: the nervous system isn’t a discrete-state machine. A tiny change in an impulse reaching a neuron can make a large difference to the impulse going out. So a discrete-state machine can’t be expected to mimic it.