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 extra-sensory perception: the statistical evidence for telepathy is overwhelming. In the imitation game, a telepathic person could name the card in the interrogator’s hand far more often than a machine guessing at random, and so be told apart from it.
Then the test needs tightening: put the competitors in a telepathy-proof room.