Can machines think, and what machine learning can teach us

One of people's biggest fears about artificial intelligence is that machines will rise up and humanity will be obsolete, that we will give'them' too much power and control, and they will take over through either benevolence or malevolence. The root of many of these science fiction horror stories is the ability for the machines to think for themselves and come to a reasoned logical conclusion. We have had a test for machine intelligence in the form of the Turing test, which sees if a machine can fool a human interrogator into thinking they are talking to another human. However, the test is not without its problems and one of my favourite criticisms of Turing's test came over Twitter: The Turing test is like saying planes don't fly unless they can fool birds into thinking they're birds. Initially I thought "ok, fair point - we are defining that the only true intelligence is described by the properties humans exhibit", and while one of the better responses did point out that cherry picking a single feature was not the same as the Turing Test, it did get me thinking based on my initial interpretation of the Tweet.