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 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.
A discrete-state machine is different from a continuous one, but in the imitation game, the interrogator can’t take advantage of the difference. A digital computer couldn’t predict exactly what a continuous machine, like a differential analyzer, would answer, but it could give the right sort of answer.