Gonçalves, Bernardo (2021) Can machines think? The controversy that led to the Turing test. [Preprint]

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Abstract

Turing’s much debated test has turned 70 and is still fairly controversial. His 1950 paper is seen as a complex and multilayered text, and key questions about it remain largely unanswered. Why did Turing select learning from experience as the best approach to achieve machine intelligence? Why did he spend several years working with chess-playing as a task to illustrate and test for machine intelligence only to trade it out for conversational question-answering in 1950? Why did Turing refer to gender imitation in a test for machine intelligence? In this article, I shall address these questions by unveiling social, historical and epistemological roots of the so-called Turing test. I will draw attention to a historical fact that has been only scarcely observed in the secondary literature thus far, namely, that Turing's 1950 test emerged out of a controversy over the cognitive capabilities of digital computers, most notably out of debates with physicist and computer pioneer Douglas Hartree, chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, and neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson. Seen in its historical context, Turing’s 1950 paper can be understood as essentially a reply to a series of challenges posed to him by these thinkers arguing against his view that machines can think. Turing did propose gender learning and imitation as one of his various imitation tests for machine intelligence, and I argue here that this was done in response to Jefferson's suggestion that gendered behavior is causally related to the physiology of sex hormones.

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Item Type:	Preprint
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Gonçalves, Bernardo begoncalves@usp.br 0000-0003-2794-8478
Keywords:	Alan Turing, Can machines think?, The imitation game, The Turing test, Mind-machine controversy, History of artificial intelligence.
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Mathematics > History of Philosophy Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Artificial Intelligence General Issues > Science and Society
Depositing User:	Dr. Bernardo Gonçalves
Date Deposited:	19 Apr 2022 16:10
Last Modified:	19 Apr 2022 16:10
Item ID:	20484
Official URL:	http://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01318-6
DOI or Unique Handle:	10.1007/s00146-021-01318-6
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Mathematics > History of Philosophy Specific Sciences > Cognitive Science Specific Sciences > Artificial Intelligence General Issues > Science and Society
Date:	6 July 2021
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/20484

Available Versions of this Item

• Can machines think? The controversy that led to the Turing test, 1946-1950. (deposited 07 Jul 2021 17:43)
  • Can machines think? The controversy that led to the Turing test. (deposited 19 Apr 2022 16:10) [Currently Displayed]

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