The Great Robotics Debate

The field of artificial intelligence has been accompanied by a vigorous debate essentially from its very beginnings. Alan Turing addressed the issue of machine intelligence in 1950 in what is probably his most well known paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," where he proposed the "Imitation Game," now known as the "Turing Test," as an operational definition for machine intelligence. The main focus of the paper is the possibility of machine intelligence. Turing carefully analyzed and rebutted arguments against machine intelligence and stated, "I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted." This view was later strenuously contested by philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle, who argued against the possibility of intelligent machines.