Can Machines Think?
Scientific and technological progress made a great contribution to the development of various branches of society. Mobile phones, tablets and computers have become an integral part of human’s life. Close integration of all these devices into society required an understanding and knowledge about the potential of all electronic machines. The term ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI) appeared (McCarthy, Shannon and Goode). A lot of researches were conducted to investigate the potentiality of machines and their possible independent functioning (Kayser). As can be expected this topic could not have gone unnoticed by philosophers of science who tried to analyze artificial intelligence from the point of view of diverse philosophic approaches. Philosophy of artificial intelligence was a topic of interest for many of bright scientists who have finally developed some important propositions showing people unlimited possibilities of artificial software and machines.One of the most famous scientists who studied AI and tried to comprehend if machines are able to think and behave like humans was Alan Turing, British mathematician, cybernetics and electronic researcher, who also played a great role in decoding of German War codes during World War II.
Turing has investigated the possibilities of machines since 1941 that allowed him to publish his most famous work ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. This work contained Turing’s test, which is considered to be the first test to understand if machine could imitate intelligence of a human (Turing). Test is based on the ‘Imitation game’ with three people (man, woman and judge) playing it. Man and woman are put into different rooms and are asked a series of questions which they suppose to answer in a way that could possibly trick judge into thinking that they are the other. With a seeming simplicity of a game, Turing offers to replace one of the participants with a machine in order to reveal if answers of machine could make people decide wrongly and suppose that it is a human. In his description of a test Turing underlines the importance to re-state the question from ‘Can the machine think?’ to ‘ Can machines do what we can do?’. Turing claims that if answers of computer could be falsely appointed as person’s answers, it would mean that computer actually can imitate human intelligence and can think as humans do.
Despite the fact that Turing’s test was strongly criticized it is still considered to be the essential concept of artificial intelligence (Halpern).The next philosopher involved into concept of artificial intelligence is John Roger Searle. He is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of California. He became famous after introduction of Chinese room thought experiment, which, however, was created to challenge the notion that computer has intellectual features similar to human mind and consciousness. The core idea of this experiment was to show that computer while performing the program did not exactly realize his actions and followed just the logics of computer program to perform a task without understanding the actual …
