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.
Arguments from various disabilities: machines may do all you say, but you’ll never make one be kind, have a sense of humor, tell right from wrong, make mistakes, fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream, learn from experience, or do something really new.
No support is usually offered for these claims. They generalize from the machines people have seen, which are ugly, each built for a narrow purpose, and able to do little else. Many of those limits come from their tiny memories, and computers’ memories are growing.