WHAT HAPPENED TO TURING’S THINKING MACHINES?

More than 60 years after his seminal 1950 paper, and following decades of exponential growth in the power of computers, Turing’s thinking machine has yet to be realised outside the realms of science fiction, where the intelligent robot – from Hal 9000 to C3P0 – is common.

Instead, modern AI posses a very different sort of intelligence to our own, one that is narrow and focused on specialised tasks such as helping to fly planes or screening loan applications. In carrying out these tasks, machines can make sound judgements faster and more consistently than people, but lack the versatility of human thought. So where are the thinking machines, and will computers ever match the general intelligence of an individual?

Key bit: “What robots find hard, we find easy — and vice versa.”