What kind of book is machines who think?What kind of book is machines who think?
Where did the idea that machines could think come from?Where did the idea that machines could think come from?
The idea that machines could think occurred to the very first computer builders and programmers. See, e.g., Alan Turing's great paper Turing 1950. The term "artificial intelligence" (AI) goes back to a summer conference in held 1956 at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
Why can't machines think?Why can't machines think?
The most important paper in this push-back was John Searle's famous paper: Searle 1980, where he argues that machines cannot think at all because they lack the proper semantical connection to the world. Summaries and replies to Searle's paper accompany it in the same journal issue ( Searle 1980 ).
Can a machine be the subject of its own thought?Can a machine be the subject of its own thought?
The claim that a machine cannot be the subject of its own thought can of course only be answered if it can be shown that the machine has some thought with some subject matter. Nevertheless, "the subject matter of a machine's operations" does seem to mean something, at least to the people who deal with it.
