Machina Sapiens: How Machines Became Intelligent Without Thinking in a Human Way
Can machines “think”? This unsettling question, posed by Alan Turing in 1950, has perhaps found an answer: today we can converse with a computer often without being able to distinguish it from a human being. New conversational intelligent agents have turned out to be capable of also carrying out tasks that go far beyond the initial intentions of their creators, and we still don’t know why: if they were trained for some skills, others emerged spontaneously as they read thousands of books and millions of web pages. Current machine learning theory does not explain many of the observations, a gap that should be addressed as a priority.