Thinking machines?

According to Discover magazine:

IBM has won a $4.9 million government grant from DARPA to begin the first phase of research on “cognitive computing”– essentially building computers that work like living brains.

Computers have long exceeded humans at brute force computational tasks, from calculating complex interplanetary orbits to (more recently) playing chess. But they are extremely limited in things we take for granted, like learning and common sense. The IBM project is ambitions in computer terms, but hardly impressive in human terms: its goal is to produce a computer with the intelligence of a cat. So we’re a long way from HAL 9000 or Skynet.

In 1950, Alan Turing described what is now known as the Turing Test, in which a computer engages a human in a “conversation” and attempts to convince the human that another human is on the other end. If the human can’t tell, the computer is assumed to be intelligent enough to pass as human. Last month there was just such a test for five sophisticated software packages and they all failed.

In other words, your computer can probably beat you at chess, but it isn’t going to replace you any time soon.