Alan Turing — "The computer is a tool that can be used to extend the human mind."
The computer is a tool that can be used to extend the human mind.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Alan Turing
"The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. These judgments are often but by no means invariably correct…"
"The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize that it is a very complex machine."
"In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still ... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should …"
"The only constant in life is change."
"The machine should be able to understand what it is doing."
Details
Attributed, general implication from his writings, but exact quote is elusive.
Date: Approx. 1950s
ShockingVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Machines don't replace human thinking — they multiply it. This argues that computers are instruments, like telescopes or microscopes, that let minds reach further than they could alone. Rather than framing computation as a threat or substitute for human intelligence, it positions technology as a cognitive amplifier: something that takes human intent and extends its reach, speed, and scope into problems otherwise too large or complex for unaided minds to solve.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career proving exactly this. His 1936 theoretical Turing machine formalized computation as mechanized logical reasoning. At Bletchley Park, his Bombe machine extended Allied codebreakers' mental capacity, cracking Enigma traffic that would have taken humans lifetimes unaided. His 1950 paper on machine intelligence wasn't about replacing minds but exploring what machines could do alongside them — computation as partnership, not replacement, was his consistent philosophical position.
The era
In the 1940s and 50s, early computers like Colossus and ENIAC were built specifically to augment human calculation — cracking codes, computing ballistics tables, solving equations that stumped rooms of human 'computers.' Simultaneously, Cold War anxieties and science fiction cast machines as existential threats. Framing the computer as a tool rather than a rival was a deliberate philosophical stance against widespread cultural fear of automation displacing human purpose entirely.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].