Why artificial intelligence needs the human touch - Microsoft News Centre Europe

"I propose to consider the question, 'can machines think?' This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the word'machine' and'think'." So wrote computing pioneer Alan Turing in the introduction to his seminal paper on machine intelligence, published in the journal Mind in 1950. That paper – introducing the'imitation game', Turing's adversarial test for machine intelligence, in which a human must decide whether what we now call a chatbot is a human or a computer – helped spark the field of research which later became more widely known as artificial intelligence. Whilst no researcher has yet made a general purpose thinking machine – what's known as artificial general intelligence – that passes Turing's test, a wide variety of special purpose AIs have been created to focus on, and solve, very specific problems, such as image and speech recognition, and defeating chess and Go champions. However, whenever AI hits trouble – such as when prototype autonomous cars cause accidents, robots look like eliminating jobs, or AI algorithms access personal data without permission, the news media surfaces major concerns about a societal downside to AI.