On The Subject of Thinking Machines – Towards Data Science

We have come a long way to building intelligent machines, in fact, the rate of progress in Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning, the two corner stones of artificial intelligence, is unprecedented. Alan Turing would have been proud of our achievements in computer vision, speech, natural language processing and autonomous systems. However, there are still many challenges and we are still some distance from building machines that can pass the Turing test. In this paper, we discuss some of the biggest questions concerning intelligent machines and we attempt to answer them, as much as can be explained by modern AI. Turing choose to avoid answering this question directly, however, it is important to have a clear and concise meaning of thinking that incorporates lessons from neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence.