Ep 68. Minisode - Can Machines Think? A Short History of AI with Taylor Bradley, SVP People & AI, Turing and Troop Podcast Host

From The TroopHR Podcast · 11:35

Show by Tracy Avin

What if the biggest question about AI was asked almost 200 years ago?In this episode of the TroopHR Podcast, host Taylor Bradley goes solo to tell the history of artificial intelligence through two people who never met. One is Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician whose notes are widely seen as early computer programming. The other is Alan Turing, the codebreaker who helped lay the groundwork for modern computing.Taylor starts in London in 1843. Charles Babbage was designing the Analytical Engine, a machine of gears and shafts that was never finished. Most people saw it as a fancy calculator. Lovelace saw that it could work with symbols and even music, not just numbers. She also drew a line that people still argue about: the machine “has no pretensions whatever to originate anything.” In her view, it could only do what we knew how to tell it to do.Next, Taylor moves to 1950. That year Turing asked “Can machines think?” in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and proposed what became known as the Turing test. He answered Lovelace directly. Machines can surprise the people who build them. Humans also build on everything they’ve already learned. And a machine that learns from experience could do things no one programmed it to do.Taylor then brings both arguments into the present, where AI systems write code, compose music and propose scientific ideas. He asks whether that counts as creating something new, and whether we hold machines to a different standard than people. He also explains why impressive output on its own doesn’t prove a machine understands what it produces.Whether you use AI at work every day, are still deciding how much to trust it, or just want to know where these tools came from, this episode is a useful reminder that the questions Lovelace and Turing raised are still worth asking.Mentioned in the Episode:Ada Lovelace’s 1843 notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, including her method for calculating Bernoulli numbers.Alan Turing’s 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” published in the journal Mind.For more information about joining our community, upcoming events, and additional resources, please visit troophr.com.Credits TroopHR Founder: Tracy Avin Show Producer: Nicole Fealey Show Host: Taylor Bradley Note: Transcripts generated by AI.

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