Machines capable of Human thought?

I’ve just watched Tech Talk on Google and read “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and been asked the question, Can human thought be replicated by a machine? Honestly, in my mind it will be an extremely long time before machines can replicate human thought. Machines today, even the most advanced ones can only do what we tell them and act on only the data we give them. They simply can't think for themselves or as Lady Lovelace said in the article can “never do anything really new”. I’d go a step further in saying that machines can only see things as they are and not what they could possibly be or the potential the thing might have. You give a child a box and they’ll imagine it as a boat, spaceship, or race car. They might tear it into pieces and use the pieces for a game they made up on the spot. Without previous data a machine wouldn’t be able to do anything like that. A better example would be playing a game of strategy. A human would be able to come up with a new strategy with the pieces without knowing any previous strategies other then what each piece is capable of. A machine would have a difficult time doing that or at least coming up with strategies that the pieces were never originally meant for.

A key aspect of this is logic. While machines can figure out consequences based on data through the use of logic and thus make a decision based on logic, humans do not always use logic or use it correctly. For example, some people choose to jump out of airplanes to do stunts that could get them seriously injured or even killed. Considering the risk levels I doubt any machine would LOGICALLY attempt these stunts. But these stunts aren’t about logic, their about having fun in a way that they individually like which brings me to another point, preference. Ask any human their favorite color and they’ll give you an answer. Ask a machine and, unless it’s been programmed by someone else, it won’t be able to answer. To a machine, it doesn’t logically matter to it what color most things are unless it’s some time of warning sign or something of similar importance. Similarly, a machine wouldn't care where it got its nutrition from (assuming it could eat or something similar) while humans tend to be picky about the things we eat. Machines can’t go against logic like humans can, they don’t have preferences over things like color or food, and they can’t create something completely new without previous data or information. Until machines are capable of these three things, I believe they will never be able to replicate human thought.