Alan Turing — "The problem of artificial intelligence is to create machines that can learn and …"
The problem of artificial intelligence is to create machines that can learn and adapt.
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More from Alan Turing
"The question, 'Can machines think?' should be replaced by 'Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?'"
"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."
"The digital computers of today are in principle exactly the same as the universal machines I described."
"We are not interested in the fact that a machine can do something, but in the fact that it can learn to do something."
"The human mind is a probabilistic machine."
Details
Attributed, general implication from his writings, but exact quote is elusive.
Date: Approx. 1950s
ShockingVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
True artificial intelligence isn't about programming rigid rules into a machine—it's about creating systems that grow from experience and adjust to new situations on their own. A machine that only executes fixed instructions isn't intelligent; intelligence requires the ability to encounter something unfamiliar and figure it out. Adaptability is what separates a thinking system from a sophisticated calculator.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' asked 'Can machines think?' and proposed the imitation game to test it. His Bletchley Park codebreaking work showed him machines could outpace humans on fixed logic—but he recognized that wasn't enough. His theoretical work on machine learning and child-machine models reflected his conviction that genuine intelligence must grow, not merely execute.
The era
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the first electronic computers—ENIAC, Colossus—were celebrated but fundamentally static: fast calculators, nothing more. Cold War pressures pushed governments to automate intelligence work. 'Machine learning' didn't exist as a discipline yet. Turing's insistence that adaptability was the defining feature of intelligence was a radical reframe at a moment when most researchers equated computation with intelligence itself.
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