Can a machine be intelligent?

Robots can do amazingly complex tasks, but will they ever be as smart as humans?

In the last few decades, engineers have developed machines that can do all manner of incredible tasks, from assembling cars, to tunnelling deep underground and exploring space. At the same time, the computer programs built to control these machines have undergone an even greater revolution. They have gone from simply carrying out a list of instructions to thinking for themselves. However, will machines ever get to what people would consider “real” intelligence?

An imitation brain

Artificial intelligence (AI) programs take in information, search for patterns in that data, and take actions based on it. If this sounds like what you do when you learn, that is no mistake. For the last 50 years, a key goal of AI research has been to make a computer program think just like humans do.

Michael Wooldridge, professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, is presenting this year’s Christmas Lectures at The Royal Institution (see panel). He told The Week Junior Science+Nature, “Different types of AI have been around for many years now, but the speed with which AI has developed has increased enormously in the last 10 years, and even more so in just the last year, with the development of Chat GPT (an advanced chatbot). The main reason this has happened is the power of modern computers.”

Not quite human