Alan Turing Quotes on Mind
Alan Turing, a founder of computer science, brought the question of the mind into the age of the machine, and the quotes gathered here trace that inquiry. His 1950 paper opened with the question of whether machines can think and proposed to approach it through what became the Turing test, treating the ability to be indistinguishable from a human in conversation as the mark of intelligence. Turing anticipated that machines would in time enter any field normally covered by the human intellect, and predicted that ordinary usage would come to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. He also reflected on human thought itself, describing mathematical reasoning as a combination of intuition and ingenuity. Drawn from his papers and broadcasts, these passages mark the beginning of the philosophical debate over artificial intelligence.
Quotes
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Attributed to Alan Turing:
“Can machines think?”
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Attributed to Alan Turing:
“A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing that it was human.”
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“Mathematical reasoning is the exercise of a combination of two faculties: intuition and ingenuity.”
Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals," section 11: The purpose of ordinal logics (1938), published in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, series 2, vol. 45 (1939) | In a footnote to the first sentence, Turing added: "We are leaving out of account that most important faculty which distinguishes topics of interest from others; in fact, we are regarding the function of the mathematician as -
Attributed to Alan Turing:
“Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine.”
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“This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be. We have to have some experience with the machine before we really know its capabilities. It may take years before we settle down to the new possibilities, but I do not see why it should not enter any one of the fields normally covered by the human intellect, and eventually compete on equal terms.”
The Mechanical Brain. Answer Found to 300 Year Old Problem' The Times newspaper, 11 June 1949 page 4 column 5. | The sentence in bold appears on the latest British £50 bank note featuring Alan Turing which was released on 23 June 2021 on what would have been his 109th birthday. -
“May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?”
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) -
“I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.”
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950) | p. 442. -
“'Can digital computers think?'. Talk broadcast on BBC Third Programme, 15 May 1951.”
'Can digital computers think?' (1951)