 In 1950 Alan Turing published a landmark paper in which he speculated about the possibility of creating machines that think . He noted that " thinking " is difficult to define and devised his famous Turing Test . If a machine could carry on a conversation ( over a <unk> ) that was indistinguishable from a conversation with a human being , then it was reasonable to say that the machine was " thinking " . This simplified version of the problem allowed Turing to argue convincingly that a " thinking machine " was at least plausible and the paper answered all the most common objections to the proposition . The Turing Test was the first serious proposal in the philosophy of artificial intelligence . 
