Alan Turing — "The whole problem can be reduced to the question: Can machines think?"
The whole problem can be reduced to the question: Can machines think?
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More from Alan Turing
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination."
"The question is not 'Can machines think?' but 'Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?'"
"The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject."
"The question of whether machines can think is a philosophical one, not a scientific one."
"We are not interested in the fact that the machine can do well, but in the fact that it can do badly."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote strips away all peripheral debates and asks the single foundational question underlying artificial intelligence: is thought a purely biological process, or can it be replicated mechanically? If machines can think, there is no ceiling on what computation can achieve. If they cannot, intelligence remains uniquely organic. Everything we now call AI hinges on how that one question is answered.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing wrote this in his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' introducing the Imitation Game, now called the Turing Test. Having spent WWII breaking Enigma with electromechanical Bombes, he had direct experience of machines performing seemingly intelligent tasks. His theoretical work on computable functions led him to believe cognition might be substrate-independent — a radical conviction that became the founding premise of computer science.
The era
In 1950, the first electronic computers — ENIAC, Manchester Mark 1 — were barely operational, filling entire rooms. WWII had just proved machines could crack codes once considered unbreakable. Cold War competition accelerated investment in automation. Philosophy, neuroscience, and computing had never seriously intersected before. Turing's question arrived at the precise moment humanity first possessed machinery capable of making it non-trivial.
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