In reality the AI field is far from creating the sentient beings seen in the media, yet this does not imply that successful progress has not been made. AI has been a rich branch of research for 50 years and many famed theorists have contributed to the field, but one computer pioneer that has shared his thoughts at the beginning and still remains timely in both his assessment and arguments is British mathematician Alan Turing. In the 1950s Turing published a paper called Computing Machinery and Intelligence in which he proposed an empirical test that identifies an intelligent behaviour “when there is no discernible difference between the conversation generated by the machine and that of an intelligent person." The Turing test measures the performance of an allegedly intelligent machine against that of a human being and is arguably one of the best evaluation experiments at this present time. The Turing test, also referred to as the “imitation game” is carried out by having a knowledgeable human interrogator engage in a natural language conversation with two other participants, one a human the other the “intelligent” machine communicating entirely with textual messages. If the judge cannot reliably identify which is which, it is said that the machine has passed and is therefore intelligent. Although the test has a number of justifiable criticisms such as not being able to test perceptual skills or manual dexterity it is a great accomplishment that the machine can converse like a human and can cause a human to subjectively evaluate it as humanly intelligent by conversation alone.

Many theorist have disputed the Turing Test as an acceptable means of proving artificial intelligence, an argument posed by Professor Jefferson Lister states, "not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain". Turing replied by saying “that we have no way of knowing that any individual other than ourselves experiences emotions and that therefore we should accept the test.” However Lister did have a valid point to make, developing an artificial consciousness. Intelligent machines already exist that are autonomous; they can learn, communicate and teach each other, but creating an artificial intuition, a consciousness, “is the holy grail of artificial intelligence.” When modelling AI on the human mind many illogical paradoxes surface and you begin to see how the complexity of the brain has been underestimated and why simulating it has not be as straightforward as experts believed in the 1950’s. The problem with human beings is that they are not algorithmic creatures; they prefer to use heuristic shortcuts and analogies to situations well known. However, this is a psychological implication, “it is not that people are smarter then explicit algorithms, but that they are sloppy and yet do well in most cases.”