On 23 June 1912, in Maida Vale, London, a
young man was born to a member of the Indian Civil Service of British India,
and the daughter of the chief engineer of Madras Railways. Young Alan showed
early signs of genius, and even at age 16, when he encountered Alter Einstein’s
work, he not only understood it, but also figured out that Einstein was
questioning Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, even though that was not explicit in
the text.
Alan later studied at King’s College,
Cambridge, where he excelled at mathematics. By 1935, he was elected a fellow
at King’s, and in 1936, he published a seminal paper, "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the
Entscheidungsproblem." Here he reformulated the limits of proof and
computation via a simple hypothetical device that would become known as a
Turing Machine. This “universal computing machine” was proved to not only be
capable of calculating any conceivable mathematical computation if it could be
represented as an algorithm, but he also proved that any such machine could
perform, or emulate, the task of any other such machine. Alan Turing had
provided the mathematical basis for computers. But he was not done.
Unfortunately, during the next few years,
there was a spot of trouble with the Germans. He worked for His Majesty’s
Government at Bletchley Park, in cryptanalysis, and developed a codebreaking
machine that enabled the Allies to crack the Enigma Code. This played a key
role in enabling an Allied victory, and it is estimated that his work shortened
the war by two years, and saved more than 14 million lives.
After that spot of bother, Alan turned his
mind back to the mathematics of computational devices. In 1950, he published a
paper in Mind, titled “Computing
Machinery and Intelligence.” Based on his previous paper, where he proved
that digital computers are ‘universal,’ in that they can in theory simulate the
behaviour of any other digital machine, Alan Turing asked that seminal question
that would drive the imaginations of computer scientists for years to come.
Since Computer A could simulate the behaviour of Computer B in an imitation
game, well, "Let us fix our
attention on one particular digital computer C. Is it true that by modifying
this computer to have an adequate storage, suitably increasing its speed of
action, and providing it with an appropriate programme, C can be made to play
satisfactorily the part of A in the imitation game, the part of B being taken
by a man?"
In other words, can a computer isolated
from a judge so that she or he cannot immediately tell whether she or he is
communicating with a person or a computer, convince this judge that it is
human? Can a computer think? Or, as the case may be, act indistinguishably from
the way someone who can think acts? And thus, the field of Artificial General
Intelligence was born.
Many people have tried in the intervening
65-plus years to invalidate his original proposal with various arguments, the
most common of which I alluded to in the previous paragraph. John Searle, for
example, proposed the following analogy – suppose an artificial intelligence is
programmed that passes this test, and understands Chinese. Then suppose he is
in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer
program, along with sufficient materials to run the program manually. He could
receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, follow the program as
written, and produce Chinese characters as output through the door. If the
program could pass Turing’s test, so could he – but he still wouldn’t understand
Chinese! And neither, ipso facto, would the computer.
And yet, this is the same problem we as
people face. Given that we can only observe the behaviour of others, how can we
be certain that they have minds that can think? Behaviour, as shown above, does
thus not guarantee that a thinking mind exists – we can only ever be certain
our own minds exist. The Turing test, it seems, would not prove that a thinking
computer would exist, but for all practical intent and purposes, it would be
indistinguishable from one that does…
Of course, simply knowing it’s possible
does not make it easy to achieve. The limitations of computer power at the time
left it to a mostly theoretical science. Yet as computational power grew, so
too were the attempts to realise what Alan Turing had theorized. Trying to
reach that elusive goal of Artificial General Intelligence in one go was soon
abandoned, but the fields of research into its specific sub-sections have borne
fruit.
Fields like machine language processing,
and translation opened up. Expert systems were created than when input with
data, would follow expert reasoning to give solutions to a problem at hand.
Games were amongst the first to gain artificial intelligence, as when the first
available commercial computer was released in 1951, both chess and checkers had
AI to play them written almost immediately. It took a while to mature,
naturally, but by 1997 computers were able to beat grandmasters at chess for
the first time, and by today, even chess AI running on mobile phones can beat
most human players.
By 2016, computer AI was able to beat the
best humans at Go, considered one of the most computationally challenging games
to win, and even now, artificial intelligence programs are inching ever closer
to being able to beat humans at poker. But it is not only games – in the
1960’s, Captain Kirk’s verbal querying of the USS Enterprise computer was
considered science fiction and over 200 years in the future, and yet today, we
carry mobile phones that can do the same thing. Apple’s Siri, Google’s
Assistant (and predecessor, Google Now), Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana
are all intelligent assistants available on a variety of computing devices that
respond to your voice and perform actions.
Slowly the parts are coming together, and
Turing’s test will become relevant as never before. Sadly, Turing was gay, and
chemically castrated in 1952 for Homosexual Acts, leading to his suicide in
1954 before his 42nd birthday. One of the greatest minds and
pioneers in computer science had his life cut short due to intolerance and the
world is worse off for it. It took the British government until 2009 to offer a
public apology for its appalling treatment of a war hero, and in 2013 Queen
Elizabeth II granted him a posthumous pardon.
Let us hope that this is not how we act
when we finally meet these new children of humanity. It is our responsibility
as people to make ethical decisions based on reason, empathy and a concern not
only for ourselves, but also other conscious, sentient beings, wherever they
may come from. And perhaps, after welcoming them into our global community, we
can offer them a glass of champagne.
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