I propose to consider the question "Can machines think?"
The start of a challenging and very readable article written in
1950, in the journal
Mind, by
Alan Turing, one of the founding fathers of
computer science. (The article 's title is "
Computing machinery and intelligence".)
The first thing it does is replace the title question with another, one that Turing considers more useful to study: what would a machine have to do before we would no longer be able to distinguish it from a thinking person? He proposes an experimental setup now known as the Turing test.