Class Discussion

Turning’s composition of idea’s in this writing composed many idea’s about the ideals of computers. At the time when this article was written technology did not have such a large impact on daily lives as it does now. However, the thoughts, theories and games that he has proposed can be applied today too many of the questions and even ethical dilemmas that we are faced with as a society moving forward with technology.
The first idea introduced is simply “Can machines think?” We know that machine cannot think. Machines have, in a sense, a hard drive that is a brain. This can be applied to articles we read at the start of the semester. But behind every computer is someone’s bias and thoughts.
The imitation game was a game played centuries ago, while this is not something that I am familiar with, the games purpose is to decided who is male, and who is female through a series of questions. Turing is applying it to computers; the third parties purpose is to decide who is a person and what “person” is a computer.
I believe that the computer can simple “imitate a person” based on the components it was proposed to do. But, if you were to ask it a question about emotion or childhood memories, would the computer be able to answer this question? I do not think so. If it could, the computer would not speak of childhood memories it had while it was being assembled, it would tell childhood stories of the programmer.
Many movies have displayed a variety of outcomes of what could happen if computers did have brains. Take I Robot for example, this highly “intelligent” robots were made, but somewhere along the way a glitch occurred and the robots turned on their creators. I personally do not want earth to be taken down by computers. I think eventually society will have computers doing all manual jobs even more so than now. But, still there is a human behind its creation.
We know that computers cannot think and do not have minds, but I believe this is the beauty as a computer. When I use a computer, I do not want to tell it my problems and it tell me what to do. I want it to regurgitate information about temperate, how to spell words and world news back to me. I do believe computers have its own digital mind within its mechanics and if I wanted to think very abstractly I could say the hard drive is its brain and the screen is its mouth/face. But, as far as human standards go, computers do not have brains.