200

14.2

Artificial Intelligence

How do you detect artificial intelligence? A first possibility is the Babbage test. The com­

puter scientist Charles Babbage proposed the following competition between humans and

computers. Both are hidden behind a cloth, and people on the outside are asked to guess

who is who. If a computer succeeds in deceiving people into thinking it is human, then the

computer has passed Babbage’s test and “possesses” artificial intelligence. Although com­

puter scientists think this test is great, I don’t find it particularly impressive. After all, the

test is probably easy to win if the human behind the cloth is trying hard to be as

14  We Can Think About Ourselves – The Computer Cannot