Can Computers Think?

Robert Wright is an incredibly intelligent man who wrote an essay called “Can Machines Think? Maybe So, As Deep Blue’s Chess Prowess Suggests”. This essay is an argument about whether or not machines can think. Throughout this essay Robert Wright shows many opinions based on different facts, observations, and experiments. In the end though, it is difficult to determine whether a machine can think. There are many tests it has to pass and not only that, but do pleasure, pain, love and grief play a part in thinking? If so then machines cannot think, because they cannot feel love and pain. All of these questions were address by Wright in his essay.

According to Wright, it is difficult to say whether machines can think. He used the example of the IBM computer, Deep Blue, which was a chess champion. Garry Kasparov, a world chess champion, decided to try to beat IBM in a chess competition to prove that computers can’t outsmart humans. Wright argued that “if we vest the honor of our species in some quintessentially human feat and then defy a machine to perform it, shouldn’t it be something the average human can do? Play a mediocre game of Trivial Pursuit, say?” (Wright 140) I agree with Wright, sure a computer can whoop my butt at chess, but could it beat me at a game of Sorry or Life? Chess is a very mathematical game that not even many humans can successfully play. So why not have a computer try to beat us at games that many of us are good at? Computers have the hardest time with simple things. They can’t recognize jokes, make small talk, and can’t recognize faces. All of these things are fairly easy for us to do, which makes me question the reasoning behind some scientists. Sure a computer can play chess, but if it can’t even make small talk, like most humans can, then can it really be said to think?

Another reason Wright doesn’t believe machines are like humans is because they don’t have souls, feelings, consciousness, senses, or love. All of these things influence our behavior and how we think and act. Without these things, we would be acting like machines, not humans, which is why machines aren’t like humans. Wright uses the Turing example to prove that machines can’t think like humans. The Turing test is a test in which there is an interrogator who communicates by keyboard. Some of the “entities” are people while others are computers and the interrogator has to decide which is which. If the computer can fool the interrogator, than it is believed that it can think. To this day, no machine has passed the Turning test, so therefore no machine has been proven to be able to “think”.

Just because a computer can play chess and do hundreds of calculations in just seconds, doesn’t mean it is able to think. This just proves that it is, indeed, a machine. A calculator can do calculations quicker than I can, that doesn’t mean it can think for itself. I think scientists want to believe that they have made something that can think on its own and be a model of a human, but right now it doesn’t seem possible. We, as humans, use our feelings to help us think and make decisions. Without feelings we would be acting soulless. We wouldn’t have any reasoning to why we did things. Computers are the same way, they don’t have feelings, and therefore can’t think like a human can and reason the way we can. Maybe eventually computers will be able to think, but so far it hasn’t.