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.
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"The human brain is a very remarkable thing, but it is not infallible."
"At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control."
"The human brain is a very complex machine, but it is still a machine."
"If it is accepted that real brains, as found in animals, and in particular in men, are a sort of machine it will follow that our digital computer suitably programmed, will behave like a brain..."
"No, I am not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I am interested in is a rather crude imitation of a child's brain."
In 1943, at the Bell Labs Cafeteria in New York. Quoted in Andrew Hodges' "Alan Turing: The Enigma".
Date: 1943
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Turing is sarcastically deflecting the ambition behind his work. By invoking a corporate executive as the benchmark for intelligence, he implies that even modest machine cognition would match human decision-makers in prestige roles — a dry joke that his goal is not superhuman AI but something practically useful, achievable, and frankly not that impressive by human standards already in existence.
This quote perfectly captures Turing's wit and his habit of disguising radical ideas in understatement. The man who formalized computation, broke Enigma, and wrote the foundational paper on machine intelligence routinely framed his most ambitious thinking in disarmingly modest terms. His 1950 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' paper proposed the Turing Test with similar deflection — redefining intelligence not philosophically but practically.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, AT&T and Bell Labs represented the apex of American technological and corporate power. Its executives symbolized institutional prestige. Turing's joke lands because postwar America celebrated managerial intelligence as sophisticated — making his implication devastating: if a machine could match that, it would already constitute remarkable achievement, exposing how mundane much celebrated human cognition actually is.
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