AI's Promise: Our post-human future

Abstract

In celebration of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, and motivated by the possibility of living forever in a cyborg body, we’ve given this forum over to refl ection on the future of machine intelligence. Turing is rightly called the father of computing, but just what did he accomplish, and what is his legacy? We begin to answer these questions with a rousing bit of speculation (and calls for restraint) by Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, who consider the real promise of artifi cial intelligence. Next, John Preston gives us pause with an argument for the view that, Turing’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, computers will never really be thinking things. The famous Turing Test for machine intelligence gets a lot of attention, but Georges Rey argues that it’s small fry compared to Turing’s lesser known and much more profound ideas. Selmer Bringsjord and Joe Johnson warn of social upheaval ahead, owed to advances in robotics. We conclude with Luciano Floridi’s thoughts not just on Turing, but on the information revolution we fi nd ourselves in. Perhaps Turing’s ideas are transforming our conception of the universe and our place in it, in ways we have yet to understand fully. Floridi argues that Turing is still with us, and his legacy is very much alive.In celebration of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth, and motivated by the possibility of living forever in a cyborg body, we’ve given this forum over to refl ection on the future of machine intelligence. Turing is rightly called the father of computing, but just what did he accomplish, and what is his legacy? We begin to answer these questions with a rousing bit of speculation (and calls for restraint) by Jack Copeland and Diane Proudfoot, who consider the real promise of artifi cial intelligence. Next, John Preston gives us pause with an argument for the view that, Turing’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, computers will never really be thinking things. The famous Turing Test for machine intelligence gets a lot of attention, but Georges Rey argues that it’s small fry compared to Turing’s lesser known and much more profound ideas. Selmer Bringsjord and Joe Johnson warn of social upheaval ahead, owed to advances in robotics. We conclude with Luciano Floridi’s thoughts not just on Turing, but on the information revolution we fi nd ourselves in. Perhaps Turing’s ideas are transforming our conception of the universe and our place in it, in ways we have yet to understand fully. Floridi argues that Turing is still with us, and his legacy is very much alive.