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 mathematical objection: results of mathematical logic, such as Gödel’s theorem, show that every machine has limits. There are questions it will answer wrongly, or not at all, however long it’s given. The human mind has no such limits.
That the human mind has no such limits has only been stated, without any sort of proof. We give wrong answers too often ourselves to be pleased at the machines’ fallibility. And there may be people cleverer than any given machine, but then there may be other machines cleverer again.