Computer science has made tremendous progress in the last fifty years that ends in the pervasive influences of computer technology in our daily life. Although computers are powerful tools for computing, modern computers are basically passive agents rigidly following the software programs (complied into machine instructions) loaded into the computer memories. Computer software in general lacks active creativity and has little capability in learning. Computers are astoundingly precise and fast in computing, but their capability and functionality are entirely constrained by computer software, and can not go beyond what are designed and implemented by human software engineers.
As a contrast, it is amazing that people can very flexibly learn to see and recognize things, to speak and understand one another using human languages, to actively explore the nature and the human society surrounding us, and to form and relate abstract concepts. We know very little about the underlying mechanism of human creativity and learning capacity. The human capability of learning and creativity is indeed a wonderful gift from God, and it points to the amazing work of God's creation. As Paul put it in Romans 1:20: "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."
Researchers in artificial intelligence, an important and interesting field in computer science, have been developing and incorporating algorithms and mathematical models into computer software so that computers can artificially mimic certain human intelligence such as playing games intelligently, conducting automatic reasoning, speech recognition, natural language understanding, and computer vision. The progress is quite remarkable in some areas and we see marvelous things like the IBM's Deep Blue chess machine and various software systems for automatic speech recognition and computer vision. However artificial intelligence in general is still very far away from matching the extent of human intelligence in areas such as natural language understanding. It actually leads us to better appreciate the "built-in" intelligence we have received from God while we study the progress and the limits of computer technology and human achievements in artificial intelligence.
