Alan Turing and the question \"can machines think?\"

Alan Turing was born in London, in 1912. He's called the father of computer science, and the phrase isn't fan exaggeration: in 1936, at 24, he described on paper an abstract machine capable of carrying out any calculation that could be written as a sequence of steps. Every modern computer is, at bottom, a physical version of that idea.

The no

During the Second World War, Turing worked at Bletchley Park, the British code-breaking center, and played a central role in deciphering the messages of the German Enigma machine. The work was secret and remained secret for decades.

In 1952, Turing was prosecuted for having a relationship with another man, which was a crime in the United Kingdom. He was convicted of "gross indecency" and, to avoid prison, accepted hormone treatment imposed as a condition. He lost access to secret government work. He died on June 7, 1954, at 41.

That was the no: the country he helped protect treated him as a criminal.

What they did

In 1950, Turing published the paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", which opens with the sentence: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" In it, he proposed what became known as the Turing test. It's one of the founding texts of artificial intelligence.

Recognition came late. In 2009, Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology on behalf of the British government. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a royal pardon. Since 2021, his face has been on the 50-pound note.

A line that isn't his. "Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things no one can imagine" is attributed to Turing on many sites. It's from the screenplay of the film The Imitation Game (2014), written by Graham Moore. The Alan Turing Institute and his nephew, Dermot Turing, have already clarified this.

What this has to do with Bairo

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez works today with artificial intelligence, and Turing's question is at the center of what he proposes. For Bairo, artificial intelligence is the extension of the human, not the problem. He speaks of a last generation of humans without AI meeting the first generation of AI, the code 0.1 or 1.0, zero and one, human and machine working together.

The parallel is one of humility: Turing asked the question; those who work with AI today live inside it. The orchestration of AI agents Bairo proposes, CLAIN, is described in A whole body, always as a proposal under construction.

And there's the other lesson: being judged for who you are, and not for what you do, is a no that no talent deserves.

Read: One name, four presences

Sources

• Alan Turing (biography): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
• Al Jazeera, "Computer pioneer Alan Turing pardoned" (2013): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/12/24/computer-pioneer-alan-turing-pardoned
• A. M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind, 1950: https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238
• The Alan Turing Institute, "Alan Turing quotes: separating fact from fiction": https://www.turing.ac.uk/blog/alan-turing-quotes-separating-fact-fiction
• Dermot Turing, "Fake quotes": https://dermotturing.com/2019/07/30/fake-quotes/
• Bank of England, the 50-pound note featuring Alan Turing: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/polymer-50-pound-note