AI is smart — but can it think?

The use of AI in our daily lives is becoming more ubiquitous than ever before. Anything you read online could be written, or assisted, by AI. But is it possible to know whether you’re reading words typed by a human or generated by a machine? And can computers really be considered “intelligent”?

Alan Turing, a British mathematician and computer scientist who played a pivotal role in WWII codebreaking, was one of the first people to think about these questions seriously, back in the 1950s. In response to the early disbelief in the power of computing, he invented the Turing test, in which a person would type out a question on a computer, and either a human or machine would answer back. If a machine could fool the user into thinking there was a human on the other side of the screen, Turing wanted those users to accept that the machine was doing something intelligent. 

The test has since become a standard way to benchmark the progress of AI research. In this video, Oxford Professor Michael Wooldridge emphasizes Turing’s incredible contributions to computing and AI, and how his ideas continue to pave the way for our modern AI revolution.

This video AI is smart — but can it think? is featured on Big Think.