AI: Thinking Outside the Chinese Room

What Searle’s famous thought experiment proves, and what it doesn’t.

Image credit: Kaori Kubota (Unsplash)

In 1980, the philosopher John Searle published a now-famous thought experiment called The Chinese Room, and nearly forty years later it is still considered by some to provide an insuperable refutation of the idea of strong artificial intelligence. Here is how Searle restated the thought…