On The Subject of Thinking Machines

An investigation of the concepts of thoughts, imagination and consciousness in learning machines. ; 68 years ago, Alan Turing proposed the question "Can Machines Think" in his seminal paper [1] titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" and he formulated the "Imitation Game" also known as the Turing test as a way to answer this question without referring to a rather ambiguous dictionary definition of the word "Think" We have come a long way to building intelligent machines, in fact, the rate of progress in Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning, the two corner stones of artificial intelligence, is unprecedented. Alan Turing would have been proud of our achievements in computer vision, speech, natural language processing and autonomous systems. However, there are still many challenges and we are still some distance from building machines that can pass the Turing test. In this paper, we discuss some of the biggest questions concerning intelligent machines and we attempt to answer them, as much as can be explained by modern AI.