The Imitation Game: Can Machines Think?

In the 1984 film “The Terminator” a robotic assassin is sent from the future to kill a woman whose son will play a pivotal role in the upcoming war against the machines. This is simply a fictional story told for the entertainment of millions at the box office, but what if it could offer some insight into the future? Artificial Intelligence is growing rapidly and will be a major threat to humanity once it arrives. Some of the greatest minds of the 21st century, such as Stephen Hawking, think that the world should hold off on creating super intelligent AI until a means of controlling or shutting it down is in place. If the AI concludes that it no longer wants to share a planet with humans, humanity would have no defense.

I believe, B.F. Skinner meant when he stated, “The real problem is not whether machines think but whether mean do” is they, machines need to be program to work efficiently and effective and the individuals should not get so comfortable with machines completing a task that they forgot how they functioned prior to the machines. For instance, people who depend on an alarm clock to wake up. Lord forbid, the electricity goes out. I have an internal alarm clock that wakes me up every morning around the same time. I believe that it is a learned behavior and they can program themselves to do so, if they really wanted

For my critical feminist lens, I will be answering the question ‘How are men and women (masculinity and femininity) portrayed differently in the text?’. I intend to explore the portrayal of both men and women in the film ‘The Imitation Game’ directed by Morten Tyldum. Furthermore, I believe that the film portrays the patriarchal structure that is the basis of the portrayal of men and women.

One of the hottest topics that modern science has been focusing on for a long time is the field of artificial intelligence, the study of intelligence in machines or, according to Minsky, “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men”.(qtd in Copeland 1). Artificial Intelligence has a lot of applications and is used in many areas. “We often don’t notice it but AI is all around us. It is present in computer games, in the cruise control in our cars and the servers that route our email.” (BBC 1). Different goals have been set for the science of Artificial Intelligence, but according to Whitby the most mentioned idea about the goal of AI is provided by the Turing Test. This test is also called the

Turing, a physicalist, believed that artificial intelligence could be achieved in the future. Turing argued that the mind was merely due to the physical aspects of the brain and so a machine could one day be created that has a mind of its own, i.e. artificial intelligence. He created a test called the Turing Test to determine whether a machine has artificial intelligence. In the Turing Test, an interrogator asks two subjects a series of questions. One of the subjects is a person, the other is the computer. The goal is for the person to imitate a computer and the computer to imitate the person. If the interrogator is fooled into thinking that the computer is the human then the computer, according to Turing, is concluded to have the ability to think and thus, have a mind. Turing argued that machines passing the Turing Test were sufficient for ascribing thought.

The most prominent example of the concept of a machine being intelligent in the manner of this so

Artificial intelligence (AI) has made a major impact in current day technology. Scientists need the help of AI to solve mysteries or problems that cannot be solved with only human intelligence. Machine and software can formulate answers almost instantaneously that could possibly take scientists days, months, or even years to solve. AI is like a helping hand for humans. In the article “Call Them Artificial Aliens” by Kevin Kelly, Kelly states that machines think differently from humans.

“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do things that no one can imagine” ("The Imitation Game - Movie Quotes - Rotten Tomatoes"). Alan Turing used these words when speaking to Joan Clark, played by Keira Knightley, about joining the Bletchley Park researchers in Southern England. Throughout The Imitation Game, this same string of words is said two other times. The quote captures a reoccurring theme portrayed within the movie. Defying adversity is the overall theme, and one that is revealed in many aspects in the movie. The Imitation Game was directed by Morten Tyldum in 2014, and it reveals the story of Alan Turing, a British mathematician who is the key component of the group who cracked the un-breakable German Enigma code during World War II. Through the film, Tyldum magnifies Turing and the complexity of his brain, illuminates the intensity Turing and fellow researchers underwent through the music playing in the background, and expands the story to different time frames to unfold a lifetime of misjudgment and misunderstanding Alan Turing endured.

Sadly, Turing left the National Physical Laboratory, his place of work, before the ACE could be built. After this event, he began working on the concept of artificial intelligence. While working out of manchester, he wrote a philosophical paper that detailed the method you could use to tell whether a computer is thinking, or merely running through data. This process, called the Turing Test, in its simplest form states how a computer in one room must be able to communicate that is it intelligent and convince a human in another room of that(Bunch). But the Turing test is not the method you use

A stimulating film exposes the fallacy of Britain’s corrupt and homophobic culture throughout the Second World War.

I was reading “Imagined Thinking Machines: Artificial Intelligence in Video Games”, written by Stephanie Rizzo on April 2, 2015, and began thinking about how wonderful it would be to develop a self-sufficient AI. For example, I wanted to create Artificial Intelligence that could have the capability of thought and creating their own decisions based on past experiences (or experience artificially generated for them through coding) just like in the movies! Of course without the robot retaliation (“I, Robot”, “Avengers: Age of Ultron, and “Ex Machina” for example). Sure, “Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence group successfully taught itself to play 22 arcade games” but I was thinking more along the lines of Smart Non Player Characters

Alan Turing put this argument forward in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. His opening pages of the paper begin with the words; "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?” (Alan Turing 1950). My main argument to this is that a computer does not have the ability to think, primarily because it was created rather than ‘born and raised’.

In attempting to answer the question of whether machines are able to think, Turing redesigns the question around the notion of machines’ effectiveness at mimicking human cognition. Turing proposes to gauge such effectiveness by a variation of an ‘imitation game,’ where a man and a woman are concealed from an interrogator who makes

Can machines think? This question, addressed by Descartes and Turing, leads to discussion of how thought is constructed and what is the mind made of. At the heart of the debate, there is a schism between Cartesian dualism and functionalism. Language is a method considered by both sides as evidence of thought and provides the test for intelligence. This essay will look at Descartes’ objections and Turing’s arguments for whether machine can ever think. This essay will argue that Turing’s, and the functionalist, view is correct. It questions whether Turing’s test provides sufficient evidence of machine intelligence, and uses Searle’s Chinese room to explain why intentionality matters.

"The Imitation Game" by Morten Tyldum, is a handsomely engrossing and poignantly melancholic thriller about code-cracking World War Two thrills. Alan Turing successfully attempts to break the enigma code which leads to 14 million lives being saved and the war being shortened by 2 years. Conflict is all over this film emotionally and physically, externally and internally, especially in the protagonist's case, Alan Turing, who isn't exactly a straight forward character. As humans we generally feel sympathy towards any human, creature, or thing that is unfairly put against or struggles against the odds just like Alan Turing in the film "The Imitation Game". A few examples of odds being stacked against Turing are; that he was homosexual in a time where this was seen to be a crime and he is blackmailed and bullied for this all through his life, he was antisocial and very awkward to socialize with, and more simply because all odds were stacked against him to crack the Enigma code