Is A-I Possible

  • Vision: The ability to make sense of what we see.
  • Natural Language: The ability to communicate with others in English or another natural language.
  • Planning: The ability to decide on a good sequence of actions to achieve your goals.
  • Robotics: The ability to move and act in the world, possibly responding to new perceptions.

Developers of Natural language processing algorithms have created many types of theories, in respect to information extraction, from extracting subject, predicate relationships, to using keywords and parts of speech phrase analysis to identify patterns of speech. Yet understanding conversation has previously eluded this community. This also may have contributed to the slow development of conversation understanding. A combination of approaches is needed to understand the way in which humans use speech. The complexities of the human mind and the creation of a digital representation of the brains information storage structure has also complicated the problem of understanding the human conversation. Grammar across the different languages often changes drastically which makes the goal of translation a large area of study. This has also been linked to Artificial intelligence, yet in itself, translation is not AI. In creating an effective translator Sentence, meaning is also necessary.

In 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing developed the concept of the Turing Machine essentially and “Automatic Machine”, this has been attributed to being the first “artificial Intelligence” in 1950 Alan Turing release a paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence”, he proceeded to pose the question “Can Machines Think?”. This topic has become a major debate and topic of study amongst many computer scientists. “When talking about the Turing Test today what is generally understood is the following: The interrogator is connected to one person and one machine via a terminal, therefore can't see her counterparts. Her task is to find out which of the two candidates is the machine, and which is the human only by asking them questions. If the machine can "fool" the interrogator, it is intelligent.” [1]In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, created the first chat bot, essentially a computer program capable of conversation, it was based upon “Rogerian” principles by Sigmund Freud, a renowned doctor, attributed as the founder of modern psychiatry. This chat bot known as ELIZA, Also known as the computer psychiatrist has been created in BASIC / JAVA and other implementations have arisen since its inception. The principles used in these programming languages have become a baseline to anybody creating chat bots or decision based help support systems.

Sci-Fi movies have often created machines, which have emotions as with the classic movie 2001: a space odyssey the ships computer “HAL9000” implements an imperative to execute the crew to study the phenomena, which is being investigated. Its unsure if the computer chose this course of action or was program with this imperative. Yet this idea is echoed by multiple following sci-fi movies. It has been the goal of many programmers to emulate ideals projected in such movies. The potential for creating an emotional machine is slowly becoming a reality. “Why give computers emotions?” a sentiment echoed by Dylan Evans (Evans, 2006), the need for emotional reaction is a human need, communication between man and machine can be said to be paramount to a working relationship, the requirement for emotional reaction can be applied to computer services, such as answering services or more advance interviewing computer services.


There are therefore a number of positions that you might adopt:


  1. Computers will never even appear to be really intelligent, though they might do a few useful tasks that conventionally require intelligence.
  2. Computers may eventually appear to be intelligent, but in fact they will just be simulating intelligent behavior, and not really be intelligent.
  3. Computers will eventually be really intelligent.
  4. Computers will not only be intelligent, they'll be conscious and have emotions.


Artificial intelligence research makes the assumption that human intelligence can be reduced to the (complex) manipulation of symbols, and that it does not matter what medium is used to manipulate these symbols - it does not have to be a biological brain! This assumption does not go unchallenged among philosophers etc. Some argue that true intelligence can never be achieved by a computer, but requires some human property which cannot be simulated. There are endless philosophical debates on this issue.