ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

7 Famous AI Quotes Explained

The past, the present, and the future of AI.

Photo by Matias North on Unsplash

AI has become intertwined with every aspect of our lives. For the last 60 years, countless scientists and philosophers have worked hard to advance the field to what it is today. Throughout the decades, several perspectives, approaches, and paradigms have guided AI research, and very wise people have expressed their thoughts and insights about its great quest: Conquering intelligence.

These insights have come to us in the form of cryptic, yet appealing phrases whose underlying meaning often escape us. We’re left there, nodding to a beautiful simplification of a complex soup of thought. But it takes expertise and years of reflection to put in a single sentence that could take a whole book. Cicero said it best, “if I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

In this article, I selected 7 famous AI quotes from world-class experts in the field and disentangled the meanings for you. Enjoy!

The Turing test

“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”

— Alan Turing

Alan Turing, often considered the father of computer science, published in 1950 a paper in which he explained that the best way to answer the question “can machines think?” was by changing the question itself. He argued that asking whether a machine can think was of no use because we couldn’t define “think” formally.

Instead, he came up with “the imitation game” — what we call today the Turing test. The imitation game is a Q&A-style game played by three agents. The interrogator (agent C) makes questions to agents A or B of the form: “Please write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge” or “Add 34957 to 70764.” Agent A’s mission is to confuse the interrogator into thinking it’s agent B. For instance, if A is a man and B is a woman, the man has to try to make the interrogator believe he is the woman.

With this framework, Turing proposed that the original question then could be replaced by “What will…