George Zarkadakis

The fear that people were too limited to be trusted to preserve peace.

So let's double down on high technological hyper-rationalism.

And that's how artificial intelligence came about.

Which brings us back to that famous Dartmouth conference in the summer of 1956.

With the Cold War driving interest in artificial intelligence, there was a lot of money up for the taking.

And a conference of mathematicians and scientists from top-tier universities and labs seemed like a pretty good investment.

There was exactly one running computer program that was operational and presented at the conference.

And it was the logic theory machine that had been developed by Alan Newell and Herbert Simon at the Rand Corporation.

And it enshrined a particular vision of the human mind.

Herbert Simon is famous for saying that human minds and modern digital computers are quote-unquote species of the same genus.

They are fundamentally the same, just a symbol processing machine that takes symbolic information as input, manipulates it according to a set of rules, and outputs decisions, solutions, judgments, and so on.

Bodies don't matter.

Society doesn't matter.

One proposed measure of machine intelligence was something called the Turing Test, named for its creator, British mathematician Alan Turing, who you might remember from the movie The Imitation Game.

was based on a parlor game for swapping gender that says a man and a woman leave the room and the party goers have to figure out who's the man and who's the woman by sending questions back and forth on paper.

And the man's job is to try to pretend to be the woman and the woman's job is to be herself.

And he says, what if we took the same test and replaced the man by a computer and the woman by any person?

And then the judge, of course, is meant to be able to figure out whether the machine is the human or the human is the human.

And what I have always found so shocking about the Turing test is that it reduces intelligence to telling a convincing lie, to putting on the performance of being something that you're not.

From the beginning, with this disembodied conception of intelligence, the question that Turing posed, what can the mind do without a body, and therefore what might the machine do since it doesn't have one, chess was one of the first answers given.