Most people are strongly biased toward not wanting a computer to be able to think. Why? For a variety of reasons, the layperson’s concept think has become so intertwined with the concept human that many people have an emotional reaction against the idea of nonhuman things thinking...
However, despite their strong feelings against the idea of thinking computers, most people have not thought about the issue very carefully and are at a loss to come up with a definition of thinking that would include most humans (babies, for example) and exclude all computers. It is sometimes humorous to hear the criteria that people who are unfamiliar with current work in artificial intelligence come up with, for they invariably choose something that computers can actually do. For example, many people propose the criterion “ability to learn from experience,” only to be told that some robots and [AI] systems have fulfilled this criterion...
Usually the second choice is something like “creativity” (“coming up with something that people judge as useful that no person has thought of before”...). When told that most experts agree that computers have fulfilled this criterion, the person still does not admit the possibility of thinking machines.
Often the person abandons the attempt to derive an operational definition at this point and instead attempts to argue that computers could not possibly think because “humans built them and programmed them; the only follow their programs.”… [but] we do not invoke the “origins” argument for other processes. Consider the process of heating food. Consider the question “Do ovens heat?” Do we say, “Ovens don’t really heat, because ovens are built by people. Therefore, it only makes sense to say that people heat. Ovens don’t really heat”? …Of course not. The origin of something is totally irrelevant to its ability to carry out a particular process.
Keith Stanovich