Alan Turing — "I am not interested in whether a machine can think, but in whether it can make m…"
I am not interested in whether a machine can think, but in whether it can make me think.
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More from Alan Turing
"Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere."
"One could say that a man can 'inject' an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would…"
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"The computer is a medium for thought."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The value of intelligence — artificial or otherwise — lies not in the process itself but in the effect it has on others. A thinking machine matters only if it provokes deeper questions, insights, or ideas in the human interacting with it. Utility is measured by intellectual stimulation produced, not by internal mechanism or capability alone.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career asking whether machines could replicate human thought, most famously through the Turing Test. Yet his deeper drive was always human understanding — cracking Enigma to save lives, building theoretical foundations others would think through for decades. He cared about what computation revealed about minds, not computation as an end.
The era
In the 1940s–50s, computing emerged from wartime necessity into peacetime possibility. Society debated whether machines were tools or something more. Turing worked when 'computer' still meant a person doing arithmetic. His era demanded justification for expensive, room-sized machines — their worth measured entirely by what problems they helped humans solve.
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