Can One Machine Do It All?
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The Analytical Engine can’t originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform, and follow our reasoning, but it can’t anticipate any truths we haven’t worked out ourselves.
Machines 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 theological objection: thinking is a function of man’s immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. So no animal or machine can think.
That restricts the omnipotence of the Almighty. Couldn’t He confer a soul on an elephant, or on a machine, if He saw fit? Besides, theological arguments have often failed before: in Galileo’s time, Bible verses were held to refute Copernicus.