Alan Turing — "We are not interested in the fact that the machine can do well, but in the fact …"
We are not interested in the fact that the machine can do well, but in the fact that it can do badly.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Alan Turing
"The computer is a universal machine."
"The machine has to be able to do something which it has never been programmed to do."
"The question is not whether machines can think, but whether they can be made to think like humans."
"In the time of Galileo it was argued that the texts, 'And the sun stood still ... and hasted not to go down about a whole day' (Joshua x. 13) and 'He laid the foundations of the earth, that it should …"
"The human brain is a very complex machine, but it is still a machine."
Verification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
A machine that only succeeds proves it was built correctly — that's engineering, not intelligence. What's revealing is how a machine fails: does it err in recognizable, human-like ways, or in cold mechanical ones? Errors expose the underlying logic, assumptions, and gaps in a system. Genuine intelligence is identifiable not by its wins but by the nature and pattern of its mistakes.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's 1950 paper proposed the imitation game specifically to evaluate intelligence through failure — a machine convincingly mimicking human mistakes was his benchmark for thinking. At Bletchley Park, he exploited Enigma operator errors, not the cipher's successes, to crack it open. His framework for artificial intelligence was built on the insight that where a system breaks down tells you more about it than where it performs as designed.
The era
In the early 1950s, computers were room-sized calculators celebrated for deterministic accuracy — their value was eliminating human error. The Cold War demanded reliable, error-free military computation. Claiming that a machine's failures were more interesting than its successes was genuinely subversive. AI as a discipline barely existed; cognition was considered exclusively biological. Turing's focus on machine fallibility anticipated probabilistic AI, neural networks, and decades of research into how systems fail in revealing ways.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].