So, in order to think, someone or something has to have a brain, or in other
words, an organ that enables someone or something to learn and understand
things, to solve problems and to make decisions. So we can define intelligence as
‘the ability to learn and understand, to solve problems and to make decisions’.
The very question that asks whether computers can be intelligent, or whether
machines can think, came to us from the ‘dark ages’ of artificial intelligence
(from the late 1940s). The goal of artificial intelligence (AI) as a science is to
make machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans
(Boden, 1977). Therefore, the answer to the question ‘Can machines think?’ was
vitally important to the discipline. However, the answer is not a simple ‘Yes’ or
‘No’, but rather a vague or fuzzy one. Your everyday experience and common
sense would have told you that. Some people are smarter in some ways than
others. Sometimes we make very intelligent decisions but sometimes we also
make very silly mistakes. Some of us deal with complex mathematical and
engineering problems but are moronic in philosophy and history. Some people
are good at making money, while others are better at spending it. As humans, we
all have the ability to learn and understand, to solve problems and to make
decisions; however, our abilities are not equal and lie in different areas. Therefore,
we should expect that if machines can think, some of them might be
smarter than others in some ways.