Alan Turing
He judges the question "can a machine think?" too ill-posed to be discussed and replaces it with a test: if conversation no longer allows the machine to be told from the human, refusing it the word is nothing but a prejudice.
British · 1912 – 1954
British mathematician and logician, one of the founders of computer science: to get past the question "can a machine think?", which he judged too vague, he proposes a test, the imitation game, where what counts is not the machine's nature but its ability to pass for a mind.
Justification
Turing judges the question "can a machine think?" too dependent on the use of words to be settled, and replaces it with a test, the : an interrogator converses blind with a human and a machine; if they can no longer tell them apart, there is no longer a reason to refuse to one what is granted to the other. To the objection that the machine would still lack consciousness of what it says, he answers that pressing it leads to solipsism: I know others think only by their behaviour, and refusing that same evidence to machines alone is arbitrary. The substrate therefore matters little, a universal machine being able to simulate any discrete-state machine.
The original question, "Can machines think?", I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion."Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind (1950)
"Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind (1950)