Artificial intelligence as a name also forged the field’s own conceptions about what it was actually doing. Before, scientists were merely building machines to automate calculations, not unlike the large hulking apparatus, as portrayed in The Imitation Game, that Turing made to crack the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. Now, scientists were re-creating intelligence—an idea that would define the field’s measures of progress and would decades later birth OpenAI’s own ambitions. But the central problem is that there is no scientifically agreed-upon definition of intelligence. Throughout
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