What kind of AI? -- The big puzzle -- Knowledge and behavior -- Making it and faking it -- Learning with and without experience -- Book smarts and street smarts -- The long tail and the limits to training -- Symbols and symbol processing -- Knowledge-based systems -- AI technology

Historical and contemporary papers on the philosophical issues raised by the Turing Test as a criterion for intelligence. The Turing Test is part of the vocabulary of popular culture—it has appeared in works ranging from the Broadway play "Breaking the Code" to the comic strip "Robotman." The writings collected by Stuart Shieber for this book examine the profound philosophical issues surrounding the Turing Test as a criterion for intelligence. Alan Turing's idea, originally expressed in a 1950 paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and published in the journal Mind, proposed an "indistinguishability test" that compared artifact and person. Following Descartes's dictum that it is the ability to speak that distinguishes human from beast, Turing proposed to test whether machine and person were indistinguishable in regard to verbal ability. He was not, as is often assumed, answering the question "Can machines think?" but proposing a more concrete way to ask it. Turing's proposed thought experiment encapsulates the issues that the writings in The Turing Test define and discuss. The first section of the book contains writings by philosophical precursors, including Descartes, who first proposed the idea of indistinguishablity tests. The second section contains all of Turing's writings on the Turing Test, including not only the Mind paper but also less familiar ephemeral material. The final section opens with responses to Turing's paper published in Mind soon after it first appeared. The bulk of this section, however, consists of papers from a broad spectrum of scholars in the field that directly address the issue of the Turing Test as a test for intelligence. Contributors John R. Searle, Ned Block, Daniel C. Dennett, and Noam Chomsky (in a previously unpublished paper). Each chapter is introduced by background material that can also be read as a self-contained essay on the Turing Test

An exhaustive work that represents a landmark exploration of both the philosophical and methodological issues surrounding the search for true artificial intelligence. Distinguished psychologists, computer scientists, philosophers, and programmers from around the world debate weighty issues such as whether a self-conscious computer would create an internet ‘world mind’. This hugely important volume explores nothing less than the future of the human race itself.

This book gives the most comprehensive, in depth and contemporary assessment of this classic topic in artificial intelligence. It is the first to elaborate in such detail the numerous conflicting points of view on many aspects of this multifaceted, controversial subject. It offers new insights into Turing's own interpretation and is essential reading for research on the Turing test and for teaching undergraduate and graduate students in philosophy, computer science, and cognitive science.

This book departs from existing accounts of Alan Turing's imitation game and test by placing Turing's proposal in its historical, social, and cultural context. It reconstructs a controversy in England, 1946–1952, over the intellectual capabilities of digital computers, which led Turing to propose his test. It argues that the Turing test is best understood not as a practical experiment, but as a thought experiment in the modern scientific tradition of Galileo Galilei. The logic of the Turing test argument is reconstructed from the rhetoric of Turing’s irony and wit. Turing believed that learning machines should be understood as a new kind of species, and their thinking as different from human thinking and yet capable of imitating it. He thought that the possibilities of the machines he envisioned were not utopian dreams. And yet he hoped that they would rival and surpass chauvinists and intellectuals who sacrifice independent thinking to maintain their power. These would be transformed into ordinary people, as work once considered 'intellectual' would be transformed into non-intellectual, 'mechanical' work. The Turing Test Argument will appeal to scholars and students in the sciences and humanities and all those interested in Turing's vision of the future of intelligent machines in society and nature.

Minds, Brains and Science takes up just the problems that perplex people, and it does what good philosophy always does: it dispels the illusion caused by the specious collision of truths. How do we reconcile common sense and science? John Searle argues vigorously that the truths of common sense and the truths of science are both right and that the only question is how to fit them together. Searle explains how we can reconcile an intuitive view of ourselves as conscious, free, rational agents with a universe that science tells us consists of mindless physical particles. He briskly and lucidly sets out his arguments against the familiar positions in the philosophy of mind, and details the consequences of his ideas for the mind-body problem, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, questions of action and free will, and the philosophy of the social sciences.

Programming Legend Charles Petzold unlocks the secrets of the extraordinary and prescient 1936 paper by Alan M. Turing Mathematician Alan Turing invented an imaginary computer known as the Turing Machine; in an age before computers, he explored the concept of what it meant to be computable, creating the field of computability theory in the process, a foundation of present-day computer programming. The book expands Turing’s original 36-page paper with additional background chapters and extensive annotations; the author elaborates on and clarifies many of Turing’s statements, making the original difficult-to-read document accessible to present day programmers, computer science majors, math geeks, and others. Interwoven into the narrative are the highlights of Turing’s own life: his years at Cambridge and Princeton, his secret work in cryptanalysis during World War II, his involvement in seminal computer projects, his speculations about artificial intelligence, his arrest and prosecution for the crime of "gross indecency," and his early death by apparent suicide at the age of 41.