What do you think about machines that think?

Samarth Deyagond
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

We speak about Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science where we claim that machines think, machines draw insights from huge data, machines identifies the patterns which a data follows and machines also predict the properties and sometimes future!

Listening this, not everyone will be convinced that machines can think! Let me make an attempt to convince. If I ask you, “ Do plants eat ?”, you will certainly say, “ Yes, they do. They absorb minerals from the soil with their roots and then send them to the leaves via Xylem and Phloem tissue and undertake the process of photosynthesis which prepares them their food.” Right? So, just because plants aren’t following the conventional way of eating as we do, we didn’t conclude that they don’t eat. Likewise, just because machines don’t think in the conventional way as we do, we cannot conclude that machines don’t think either. They do think, in their own way.

If today, humans are intelligent to this extent, then it is because of the fact that nature helped us to understand our surroundings, nature supported us to question our experiences and find an answer to it. Right in the same way, the computers are evolving and we humans are acting as nature for them. We are helping them explore the insights from the data by developing machine learning and deep learning algorithms and with this there will come day when computers and humans will co-exist in this society.

How did this all began? The story is beautiful. When Charles Babbage first invented the computer, he said, “ I built the most complex machine that calculates. “ but Lady Ada Lovelace who sounded like a visionary said, “ I don’t see this computer just as a calculating device rather I see a potential in it to do everything that a human does. Because computer does math and everything human does is math as well.” Her words were not justified right at that time. Then comes the real hero of computer science, Allan Turing who said, “Machine is said to be intelligent when the work done by machine is indistinguishable from that done by humans.” This laid a foundation for Turing Machine which is the final court of decision to decide if a problem is solvable by a computer.

See, how visionaries thought about the possibilities and probabilities, how great men worked and today the growth of fields like Machine learning, Artificial Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing and Data Analytics is simply dramatic. They are independent and interdependent as well. Almost everything involves their application. This has led to the formation of new work domains like Computational Biology, Neural Sciences, Knowledge Graphs and derivation of interconnected knowledge (which Google does) and what not?

All this wouldn’t have been possible if we had not allowed the computers to evolve just like we evolved. With this five minutes of reading, tell me now, “What do you think about machines that think ?

Thanks for reading!

Samarth Deyagond

Written by

Research & Development Engineer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise R&D.