Alan Turing — "The question, 'Can machines think?' should be replaced by 'Are there imaginable …"
The question, 'Can machines think?' should be replaced by 'Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?'
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Details
From his paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', published in the journal Mind.
Date: 1950
PhilosophicalVerification
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Instead of debating the abstract, philosophical question of whether machines can truly think, we should ask a concrete, testable question: can a machine convincingly imitate human conversation well enough that a person cannot tell the difference? Replace unanswerable metaphysics with a practical, empirical test we can actually run.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing proposed this directly in his landmark 1950 paper introducing the Imitation Game, later called the Turing Test. As a mathematician who broke Enigma by building machines that mimicked enemy logic, Turing consistently converted abstract problems into computable procedures. He believed operational definitions beat philosophical debates.
The era
In 1950, computers were room-sized calculating machines; the idea they could simulate thought was radical. Cold War pressures accelerated computing research while philosophers debated consciousness. Turing reframed AI before the field existed, shifting discourse from theology and philosophy toward engineering, anticipating debates that dominate artificial intelligence research seventy-five years later.
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