Can a machine ever think?
Would a supersmart AI have a conscious experience like us? As Marcus du Sautoy demonstrates, you can fake intelligence.
Imagine we had invented a computer that could act like a human in every possible way. Every decision it made, every word it spoke, seemed to be the same as a living, breathing person. Is it thinking, understanding and experiencing the world as we do? Or is it just a hollow shell, soullessly mimicking us without any conscious experience?
The American philosopher John Searle hoped to explore this question with the elegant “Chinese room thought experiment”. In the video above from the BBC programme Horizon, you can watch mathematician Marcus du Sautoy play out Searle’s brainchild and explore its implications.
