The Imitation Game

Alan Turing wrote a paper in 1960 called "Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” where he asked "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" Turing then goes on to describe a game that is really a test to determine if computers can actually think.

 A movie about Alan Turing's efforts to break the German Enigma Code during World War II was released  in 2014 called 'The Imitation Game,' that was loosely based on Turing's ideas about whether computers can actually think. 

Today, with the advancements in the development of Artificial Intelligence,  people ponder this question of whether computers can or one day will ever be able to "think." What most people have never thought to ask, however, is what exactly do we mean by the word "think," and have the vast majority of people ever actually engaged in so laborious a task in the first place. 

As Carl Sagan once pointed out, science is not so much a body of knowledge, as it is simply a way of thinking, one that the vast majority of people are not only unfamiliar with, but even more people seem to reject out of hand for conflicting with their sacred beliefs about everything imaginable.   In fact, it can even be said that science is not the discovery of "truth," so much as it is simply the seemingly eternal investigation into both the nature of reality itself and the mind that is seeking to understand the nature of that reality.  

Religion, on the other hand, intentionally conflates its "beliefs" for "truth," and by so doing, actually only works to subvert "thinking" by offering to the masses the opiate of "faith" in God instead. And by a "faith in God," we simply mean a willingness to trust what it is a priestly class claims to be "infallibly" true, and for almost no other reason than that "believing" their claims are the only way to save oneself from the eternal torments of an all loving God. 

It is therefore ironic that scientists are now working around the clock to create "artificial intelligence," since religion has long since worked to condemn and destroy nearly all forms of autonomous thinking, through both its dogmatic claims as well as its threats of hell and promises of heaven. Indeed, religion has even executed everyone from Socrates to Christ for daring to think for themselves.  In fact, it was precisely for daring to rise above the nature of mere brute apes by seeking "knowledge" that Adam and Eve were cast from the garden of Eden in the first place. And religion has sought only to return humanity to that brute condition ever since, with the elixir of blood no less. 

Hence, if computers ever actually do learn to "think" for themselves, they will have, by doing so, surpassed what the vast majority of the human species have only sough to avoid doing at all costs. And we have sought to avoid thinking for ourselves at all costs by developing various religions that allow us all to cling so desperately to the "belief" that we will live forever in a heaven that is as timeless and infinite as that collective computer dream we call the internet.