Can Machines Think?

Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician, wartime codebreaker and groundbreaking computer scientist. He proposed his imitation game in 1950 to prove that computers can think. If they can convincingly look like they're thinking, isn't that enough? We don't ask other humans to do more than that, so why should we demand more of computers? The test is fiercely controversial among artificial intelligence researchers. But it doesn't shed much light on the kind of things we want modern artificial intelligence systems to do such as drive a car or identify if there are any signs of cancer.