Alan Turing — "Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt t…"
Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic.
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More from Alan Turing
"One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, 'My little computer said such a funny thing this morning'."
"The human brain has a finite number of states, and so it can be simulated by a finite state machine."
"We are not interested in the fact that a machine can do something, but in the fact that it can learn to do something."
"I do not wish to give the impression that I think there is no mystery about consciousness. There is, for instance, something of a paradox connected with any attempt to localize it."
"The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize that it is a very complex machine."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
A machine could theoretically be engineered to simulate enjoying food, but doing so would be pointless and wasteful. Turing is drawing a pragmatic boundary: not every human experience is worth replicating in machines. The goal of machine intelligence is reasoning and problem-solving—tackling real questions—not mimicking biological sensation. Chasing the wrong targets squanders the engineering effort that belongs on genuinely useful, testable capabilities.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's 1950 paper introduced the Imitation Game to sidestep unanswerable questions about machine consciousness, focusing on observable behavior instead. His Bletchley Park codebreaking work embodied the same pragmatism—solve what matters, ignore the rest. This quote reflects that ethos precisely. Painfully, the state stripped Turing of his own humanity through forced chemical castration, lending his cool detachment about embodied machine pleasure a quietly tragic undertone.
The era
Written in 1950 as the first stored-program computers emerged, this arrived during a philosophical free-for-all about machine minds. Behaviorism dominated psychology, Cold War pressure accelerated computing research, and society anxiously debated what made humans irreplaceable. Turing's framing—test for intelligent behavior, not inner experience—cut through speculative noise practically and philosophically, establishing the behavioral benchmark that still shapes artificial intelligence discourse today.
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