Alan Turing — "The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fal…"
The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject.
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More from Alan Turing
"This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be."
"We are trying to create a machine that can solve problems."
"The computer is a tool that can be used to extend the human mind."
"The computer is a universal simulator."
"The main problem with artificial intelligence is that it is too easy to make a machine that can do what we want it to do, but too hard to make a machine that can do what we don't want it to do."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Turing argues that dismissing machines as incapable of surprise rests on a logical error. People confuse 'deterministic' with 'fully predictable' — assuming that because a machine follows rules, its outputs are always foreseeable. But complexity emerges from simple rules in ways that genuinely astonish even their creators. A machine operating within its programming can still produce results no human anticipated, making surprise a real and valid property of computation.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing wrote this in his landmark 1950 paper proposing the Turing Test. At Bletchley Park, his Bombe machines cracked Enigma ciphers in ways that astonished Allied commanders. He was simultaneously developing morphogenesis theory, showing how simple biological rules generate surprising organic patterns. Throughout his career Turing personally witnessed machines producing outputs exceeding human prediction, making this argument autobiographical as much as philosophical — a defense rooted in lived engineering experience.
The era
Published in 1950, this quote emerged as electronic computers first appeared — widely seen as sophisticated adding machines incapable of genuine thought. Post-war philosophers invoked Gödel's incompleteness theorems to argue mechanistic limits on intelligence. Meanwhile, Cold War pressures created urgent demand for computational cryptanalysis. Academic dismissal of machine cognition was near-universal, and Turing's paper directly challenged that consensus at the precise moment computing was becoming a serious scientific discipline.
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