In what sense, if any, can a machine be said to 'know' something? How can anyone believe that a machine can think?

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Hwang

Min Hwang

TOK: Period 6

Mr. Cannon

September 16, 2003

In what sense, if any, can a machine be said to ‘know’ something? How can anyone believe that a machine can think?

        May 1997 marked the monumental achievement of mankind to some, the failure to defend “dignity of humanity” to some, or, to others, nothing much at all. In May 1997, the supercomputer “Deep Blue”, designed by IBM, defeated Garry Kasparov, the chess champion of the world, in his own game. People believed that this event showed the development increasingly authentic artificial intelligence, and also believed that the development artificial intelligence – even rivaling the intelligence and thought of the human mind, was only a matter of time. This sparked a series of old questions anew – how can a machine be said to have knowledge? How can a machine have thought? A man-made machine can ‘think’ and ‘know’, as long as it is able to reproduce the interactions necessary for thought, but its abilities to do so will be limited by the abilities of its creator.

        Knowledge, simply put, is a belief or claim that is justified with logical analysis of sufficient empirical evidence gathered through perception at one point. To think is to draw logical inferences, through reason and judgment – in other words, to execute a finite sequence of logical extrapolations to arrive at conclusions. Knowledge is, in one way or another, the end product of perception run through a function which we call thought, or the act of thinking. So for a machine to have knowledge, to ‘know’, it is necessary first for it to ‘think’.

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        For a machine to ‘think’, and to have ‘knowledge’, it needs to have the ability to reason, which would be in the form of numerous algorithms, such as in “Deep Blue”. This world chess champion has the ability to think, because it possesses certain algorithms which analyzes data it receives, to arrive at conclusions, to ‘know’. The obvious way the computer showed its ability to think was by analyzing the chess game at a rate of up to two hundred million moves per second, with its analysis shortly followed by a conclusion, the conclusion being the position it decided to ...

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