Alan Matheson Turing (1912-1954): Biography (Links to an external site.); Work: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Links to an external site.) (Turing, 1950).

John McCarthy (1927-2011): Homepage, (Links to an external site.) especially What is Artificial Intelligence? (Links to an external site.) (McCarthy, 2007).

Herb Simon (1916-2001): Meet the Nobel Laureates in Economics: Do we understand human behaviour (Links to an external site.) (UBS, n.d.).

Marvin Minsky (1927-2016): AI pioneer Marvin Minsky dies aged 88 (Links to an external site.) (BBC News, 2016).

Timnit Gebru (1982): We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says (Links to an external site.) (Hao, 2020).

Turing was one of the pioneers of artificial (“machine”) intelligence and defined many foundational concepts. He argued that machines could simulate reasoning and devised the Turing test that determined that a computer could “think” if its responses to conversations were indistinguishable from human responses.

McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence as the “science and engineering of making intelligent machines” (McCarthy, 2007) and wrote Lisp, a programming language widely used for AI research. He argued that machines can “understand” and “have beliefs”, which sparked debate that continues to present day.

Simon created the Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver to demonstrate that computer programs could solve problems, advancing the notion that machines could “think”. The Logic Theorist used deductive reasoning and proved mathematical theorems better than humans in some cases. The General Problem Solver broke down problems into components and then solving each component.

Minsky built the first neural network machine, SNARC, which solved problems using primitive machine learning. He studied human psychology using computational ideas and theorized that intelligence could result from interactions of non-intelligent parts. Minsky defined AI as “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men” (Minksy, 1968).

Gebru is an advocate of ethics and diversity in AI research. She is an outspoken critic of biases in AI due to the field consisting of predominantly white male researchers, and has succeeded in increasing scrutiny of tech giants such as Google and Amazon.

My answers were written using my prior knowledge and experiences with the terms and concepts given. I knew nothing about the scientists in Question 1 apart from Turing, so I answered using online information almost exclusively. Because of the word limit, I prioritized conveying information over sentence structure or descriptiveness, risking the final product sounding robotic. However, the process of creating the product involved a combination of other skills of which machines are not necessarily capable yet, such as judging the credibility of information sources and synthesizing a paragraph by selecting information and organizing them into sentences with a logical flow. Above all else, I believe prioritization would be the main factor distinguishing my answers from those of a machine. Not only did I prioritize the style of writing and content, but also the time and effort spent by performing a cost-benefit analysis. For this assignment, I can flexibly compartmentalize different tasks required such as reading, searching, writing, and editing, and allocate time appropriately. Finally, the metacognition needed to answer this question is the best Turing test as machines have no such self-awareness. I can recognize the imperfections in my responses and even their causes whereas a machine does not self-reflect.