By Charles Simon, a nationally recognized entrepreneur and software developer. Let's look into a future in which thinking machines have surpassed humans in mental powers. Will computers be our partners or our masters? And how will computers see us? To answer, let's consider thinking machines after the initial creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – the ability of an artificial entity to learn and understand any intellectual task that a human can.

By Charles Simon, Nationally recognized entrepreneur and software developer. With artificial intelligence (AI) seemingly touching every aspect of our lives, most experts agree that it's only a matter of time before today's AI evolves into Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), a point at which computers meet or even exceed human intelligence. The question that remains, though, is how will we know when that happens? In 1950, Alan Turing introduced his famous test as a method for determining whether or not a machine was actually thinking. A person, the interrogator (C), can communicate via a computer terminal (these days, we might say by instant-messaging, emailing, or texting).