People and machines in communication / Personas y máquinas en comunicación

Abstract

It was 1937 when Alan Turing published his most famous article in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. In this work, for the first time, he presented an idealized description of the mathematical inner workings of such universal machines as would eventually become instantiated in what we now call computers. This extraordinary step in the history of ideas provided a theoretical boon that later on would prove important for the development of the computational theory of mind. According to this theory, the cognitive processes of human beings could be likened to the algorithms that apply to the representations of the external world. Based on this hypothesis, since the middle of the last century, attempts have been made to replicate the functioning of the human mind using a computer. The aim of this article is to present the differences that still exist between humans and intelligent machines. From ELIZA onwards, we have seen several developments including ALICE, up to XiaoIce. Despite the evolution of intelligent machines and the creation of social chatbots in particular, artificial intelligence still has shortcomings that set it apart from man: the way it knows, the lack of consciousness and of agency.