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The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics: An Imitation of Thought
On the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics
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Can a machine think? The question is a vague one, not least because we have no proper definition of what “thinking” actually is. Stretch it too far and anything — even a simple thermostat — can be accused of thinking. Define it too narrowly, and even some humans might be denied the ability.
Since the emergence of computing, however, people have been asking if computers might someday begin to think. Ada Lovelace, one of the first to seriously consider the possibility, thought it unlikely. Computers, she wrote in the 1830s, could not “originate anything”, and would merely do “whatever we know how to order”. Machines could only do what they were programmed to do, she argued, and no thinking was required for that.
But what, others later asked, if we programmed a computer to learn? Could it then learn to reason for itself, and perhaps even to program itself? And if we could do that, would a computer be capable of learning to be creative, and perhaps of producing some original thought? Might it then be said that a computer — a mere instruction taker — had learned to think?
