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Alan Turing saw it coming. 鈥淢achines take me by surprise with great frequency,鈥 he wrote in 鈥 the same 1950 paper that begins 鈥淚 propose to ask the question 鈥楥an machines think?鈥欌 and goes on to set down the rules of an Imitation Game, or what we call the Turing Test, designed to get the measure of an artificial intelligence.
Turing was pushing back against the idea that computers could do nothing more than what they were instructed to do. Despite his arguments, it is a reputation they were stuck with for decades. Machines are robotic. They…
