ATTITUDES TOWARD INTELLIGENT MACHINES

This is an attempt to analyze attitudes and arguments brought forth by questions like "Can machines think?" and "Can machines exhibit intelligence?" Its purpose is to improve the climate which surrounds research in the field of machine or artificial intelligence. Its goal is not to convince those who answer the above questions negatively that they are ative wrong (although an attempt will be made to refute some of the neg arguments) but that they should be tolerant of research investigating these questions. Samuel Butler (1835-1902), in Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited (1933), concocted a civil war between the "machinists" and the "antimachinists." Butler stated "there is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now" and specylated that the time might come when "man shall become to the The topic came into prominence in the late 1940's when Babbage's dreams became a reality with the completion of the first large digital computers. When the popular press applied the term "giant brains" to these machines, computer builders and users, myself included, immediately arose to the defense of the human intellect. We hastened metic to proclaim that computers did not "think"; they only did arith A. M. Turing, who earlier had written one of the most important papers In it he circumvented the problem of properly defining the words "machine" and "thinking" and examined instead the question of a game This is now known throughout the computer field as "Turing's Test." Discussion of machine intelligence died down (but not out) in the early and mid-1950s but has come back in the last several years stronger than ever before. In fact, it has recently invaded the pages of Science (Mac-Gowan, 1960; Wiener, 1960; Taube, 1960; Samuel, 1960b). Like Turing, I avoid defining "to think." This notion is certainly not new, for it has existed since plicit man first compared his mental abilities with another man's, and it is im in all of the positive arguments on machine intelligence. Psychologists long ago developed "intelligence quotient" tinuum, as a yardstick in this con Existing commercial jet transports cannot transport people from one lake to another. But men cannot carry the load that a jeep can nor can men move with the speed of the jeep. Similarly, comparisons can be made between men and machines in the continuum of thinking. If there is objection to the use of the word "thinking," then "ability But it must be admitted that there exists some con of behavior in which men and machines coexist and in which they can be compared.