Week 9/24: Chapter 2 Question 3

I really enjoyed reading this chapter because it just opens our minds to so many possibilities and how different we can view things like the existence of God, gender differences, technology, and evolution. The concept I found the most interesting this week is the section called Artificial Intelligence, Reason, and Emotion on page 46. Artificial intelligence is defined as “the study of the computations that make it possible for machines to perceive, reason, and act.” The goal of AI is to build a machine than can think of complex things like emotions or making decisions.  Boss brings up the idea that computers surpass human intelligence to some extent like their ability to search databases in just seconds and share those databases with other computers through the Internet.  To determine if a computer can “think,” Alan Turing created the Turing test where a person is asked whether he or she is talking to a person or a machine. If the machine can indeed communicate like a person, then it has the intelligence of a human being.  No machines have actually passed this test.  Herbert A. Simon, the “father of artificial intelligence,” also believes that machines can have emotions. There is still debate whether such a thing could be possible. Some scientists believe that cyborgs, “humans who are partially computerized,” may happen in the future as they are already making progress in being able to meld computers and human beings.