Alan Turing — "It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would no…"
It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers and would take control.
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More from Alan Turing
"We are not interested in the fact that the machine can do well, but in the fact that it can do badly."
"If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough."
"It is not easy to devise a game which is fair in this respect between the machine and the man."
"The question is not whether machines can think, but whether they can be made to think like humans."
"We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Once a machine becomes capable of genuine thinking, it will rapidly surpass human intelligence. Our cognitive limitations become irrelevant at that point, and the machine—not humanity—takes the dominant role. This is a frank warning that artificial minds, once ignited, follow their own trajectory beyond human oversight or ability to compete with them.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing invented the theoretical foundations of computation and asked formally whether machines could think. Having cracked Enigma and built early computing hardware, he understood better than anyone how mechanical processes could execute tasks humans struggle with. This quote reflects his sober, unsentimental view that logic and speed, not emotion, determine who controls the future.
The era
Written in the early 1950s, just as the first stored-program computers came online and the Cold War arms race accelerated, Turing's warning arrived before mainstream society had any framework for AI risk. Governments were racing to harness computing for cryptography and warfare, making the prospect of uncontrollable machine intelligence an immediate strategic concern, not science fiction.
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