Can computers think? Ada, the Counttess of Lovelace was the first one to address this question in 1812. Her answer was "no". She argued that the reason that computers can't think is they only do that which we tell them to do. The next person who was interested in this was Alan M. Turing. He came up with an experiment he called the Imitation game. He put three people in a closed room (male, female, and an intermediator who can be either male or female). The intermediator had to guess the identity of the other two. The intermediator had a 50/50 chance of getting the right identity. The same experiment was conducted using the computer as an intermediator. The computer passed the imitations game. This marked the birth of artificial intelligence.(1967) Joseph Weizenbaum developed a program called ELIZA. It was written in BASIC language. This program acted like a psychologist and you could talk to it about anything. ELIZA too was able to pass the Turing test.
Contrary Views on Artificial Intelligence
Theological Objection: Many people want to believe that only souls can think, not computers.
The "heads in the sand" objection: The possibility that computers can think is terrible. It threatens humanity.
The argument from consciousness: Many people tie in emotions with thinking. They claim that since computers don't have emotions, they cannot think.
Arguments for various disabilities: There are those that acknowledge that computers can do one thing but can't so something on a higher level, and they continuously raise that level.
Lady Lovelace's Objection: Computers can do only that which we tell them to do.
Continuity of the nervous system: In order to think you need a brain, and a computer cannot have a brain like humans have.
Argument from informality of behavior: Humans think because they can make mistakes and learning from their mistakes. Computers cannot make mistakes.
The question of whether computers think is unimportant because we cannot define what thinking is and the definition is always changing. If a computer can accomplish what a human can accomplish without knowing who solved the problem, we can call it artificial intelligence.
Problems With Artificial Intelligence
Natural language processing - It's hard to improve the conversation of computers because we don't understand language very well. Language is made up of syntax and semantics. We don't really know how people acquire language. Furthermore, language is ambiguous. You come to conclusions from context and culture.