Alan Turing — "The development of artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on societ…"
The development of artificial intelligence will have a profound impact on society.
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More from Alan Turing
"If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it well enough."
"We are all stardust."
"I am not afraid of computers. I am afraid of the people who program them."
"The machine should be able to make mistakes."
"The idea of a 'mind' is a human construct, and it may not apply to machines."
Details
Attributed, general implication from his writings, but exact quote is elusive.
Date: Approx. 1950s
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Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Machines that think will fundamentally reshape how humans work, communicate, make decisions, and understand themselves. Intelligence, once mechanized, rewrites every system it touches — medicine, warfare, labor, law, and governance alike. The shift isn't merely technological; it's civilizational. It compounds across generations and nations, altering what skills matter, who holds power, and ultimately what it means to live as a human being.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing coined the Turing Test in 1950 to ask whether machines could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human's. His 1936 paper on computable numbers laid the mathematical foundation for every computer ever built. Having cracked Nazi Enigma codes at Bletchley Park, he'd already seen how a single computational advance could tip a world war. The prospect of machine intelligence didn't strike him as distant speculation — it was the logical next step in work he'd already begun.
The era
The 1940s and 50s witnessed technology's raw civilizational power: the atomic bomb, radar, and codebreaking had just decided World War II. Computing barely existed as hardware — ENIAC launched in 1945, room-sized and purpose-built. Yet Turing, writing in 1950, was already thinking past calculation toward cognition. Society had no framework for machine minds. Cold War paranoia and industrialization shaped anxious questions about automation, human obsolescence, and who controls the tools that control everything else.
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