Can machines think?

In a lecture held by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman (1918–1988) on September 26th, 1985, the question of artificial general intelligence (also known as “strong-AI”) comes up.

Audience Question

Do you think there will ever be a machine that will think like human beings and be more intelligent than human beings?

Richard Feynman’s Answer

First of all, do they think like human beings? I would say no and I’ll explain in a minute why I say no.

Second, for "whether they be more intelligent than human beings" to be a question, intelligences must first be defined. If you were to ask me are they better chess players than any human being? Possibly can be, yes, "I'll get you, some day".

By 1985, of course, human chess grand masters were still stronger than machines. Not until the legendary six-game matches between world chess champion GM Garry Kasparov and the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in 1996 and 1997 did a computer beat a world-class chess champion. Even then, the score was 3 1/2 to 2 1/2, and Kasparov ended up disputing the loss, claiming the IBM team had somehow intervened on behalf of the machine between matches.

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The Problem of Pattern Recognition

But, what a human has to do for his own.. Always, they always do this. They always try to find one thing, darn-it that they can bdo better than the computer. So, we now know many, many things that humans can do better than a computer.

She's walking down the street and she's got a certain kind of a wiggle, and you know that's Jane, right? Or, this guy is going and you see his hair flip just a little bit, it's hard to see, it's at a distance but the particular funny way that the back of his head looks, that's Jack, okay?

To recognize things, to recognize patterns, seems to be something we have not been able to put into a definite procedure. You would say, "I have a good procedure for recognizing a jacket. Just take lots of pictures of Jack" --by the way, a picture can be put into the computer by this method here, if this were very much finer I could tell whether it's black and white at different spots. You know, you in fact get pictures in a newspaper by black and white dots and if you do it fine enough you can't see the dots. So, with enough information I can load pictures in so you put all the pictures of Jack under different circumstances, and there is a machine to compare it.

The trouble is that the actual new circumstance is different. The lighting is different, the distance is different, the tilt of the head is different and you have to figure out how to allow for all that. It's so complicated and elaborate that even with the large machines with the amount of storage that's available and the speed that they go, we can't figure out how to make a definite procedure that works at all, or at least works anywhere within a reasonable speed.

So, **recognizing things is difficult** for the machines at the present time, and some of those things that are done in a snap by a person.. So, there are things that humans can do that we don't know how to do in a filing system. It is recognition, and that brings me back to something I left which is what kind of a file clerk that has some special skill which requires recognition of a complicated kind.

For instance a clerk in the fingerprint department which looks at the fingerprints and then makes a careful comparison to see if these finger prints match, has not been.. It's just about ready to be.. It's hard to do, but almost possible to do it by a computer.

The Current State of Artificial Intelligence (1985)

You'd think there's nothing to it, I look a the two fingerprints and see if all the blood dots are the same, but of course, it's not the case. The finger was dirty, the print was made at a different angle, the pressure was different, the ridges are not exactly in the same place. If you were trying to match exactly the same picture it would be easy, but where the center of the print is, which way the finger is turned, where there's been squashed a little more, a little bit less, where there's some dirt on the finger, whether in the meantime you got a wart on this thumb and so forth are all complications. These little complications make the comparison so much more difficult for the machine, for the "blind filing clerk system", that is too much. Too slow, certainly to be utterly impractical, almost, at the present time.

I don't know where they stand but they're going fast trying to do it. Whereas a human can go across all of that somehow, just like they do in the chess game. They seem to be able to catch on to patterns rapidly and we don't know how to do that rapidly and automatically.
我不知道他们的立场，但他们正在快速努力做到这一点。 而人类可以以某种方式经历所有这些，就像他们在国际象棋游戏中所做的那样。 他们似乎能够快速掌握模式，但我们不知道如何快速、自动地做到这一点。

https://youtu.be/ipRvjS7q1DI

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