Alan Turing, The extent of Automated Intelligence

Alan Turing was born in England in 1912 and was a mathematician, computer scientist, logician and philosopher. Turing was way ahead of his time in computer science. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking center that produced Ultra intelligence. Turing played a crucial role in cracking intercepted coded messages that enabled the Allies to defeat the Nazis in many crucial engagements.  In 1954 Turing was suspected to have committed suicide after being sentenced to castration for being in a sexual relationship with a 19 year old man. In 1935, 8 years before the modern computer would be invented, he came up with the stored program concept. Turing described his “stored-program” concept, which described a computing machine with limitless memory, that would scan its memory to form symbols, and would modify or improve its own program as it learned. This is now known as a “Turing machine”, and all modern computers are in essence Universal Turing machines. He also came up with the Turing test which was a method of inquiry in artificial intelligence (AI) for determining whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a human being. The Turing test was a thought experiment where essentially a human and a machine  would each try to convince a judge that it is the human. Turing never considered himself a philosopher, but his 1950 Paper “computing machinery and intelligence” is the most commonly cited modern philosophical literature. His argument was not that computers could think, but rather learn and talk in the same way a human does. He believed that by the end of the century that humans will not be able to differentiate machine thinking from human thinking. He also believed that the human mind is limited and described the mind as a finite machine. He argued that the human brain must somehow be organized for intelligence and the organization of the brain must be realizable as a finite discrete state system.

 A discrete system is a system with a countable number of states. He acknowledged limitations to the power of any machine but argued that there is no proof that shows humans intellect didn't have the same limitations,  And so he argued that if the brain was like a machine, then mental function can be achieved by programming a computer. He also argued that although the brain is like a discrete system humans cannot be machines because they are clearly governed by laws of behavior and nature. Before his death Turing wrote in a letter in jail to his friend somewhat contradicting his earlier statements by directly calling himself machine in which he said: 

Turing believes machines think

Turing lies with men

Therefore Machines do not think

In this syllogism he seems to be calling back on his notion that the human brain is a machine, and because of the way his sexuality was viewed at the time period, and is not something he can think about and change. 

I found this super interesting and I wish he dove deeper into this because there are so many things that I do in my daily life, without thinking, and look back on it questioning what made me do it. Machines cannot have internal battles with things such as sexuality or addiction, and that is why I believe that AI cannot think the same way humans do. AI can learn to act like humans but do not yet have the ability to have these internal battles. They may be able to act to express emotion but do not experience it in the same way humans do. I think there is a fine line that can be drawn between computers and humans would be consciousness and the soul. If our brains truly function like computers then I believe our heart is what differentiates us from computers. 

If computers are some day programmed to experience these things, what would then be the line we draw in between humans and computers?