Alan Turing — "May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but…"
May not machines carry out something which ought to be described as thinking but which is very different from what a man does?
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Turing asks whether machines could perform a process that deserves the label 'thinking,' even if that process differs fundamentally from human cognition. He challenges the assumption that thinking must look or feel the same across all entities — opening the possibility that non-human intelligence is real intelligence, just operating by different mechanisms.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career reducing mental tasks to formal, mechanical operations — from Turing machines to the Bombe codebreaker. This question directly seeds his 1950 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' paper and the Turing Test. He rejected the idea that biological substrate defines thought, likely shaped by his outsider status and unconventional mind.
The era
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, electronic computers had just emerged from wartime secrecy. Most scientists viewed machines as pure calculators, not thinkers. Cold War anxiety about automation, Soviet technology, and nuclear futures made questions about machine capability politically charged. Turing's question arrived precisely when humanity first had hardware capable of making it non-hypothetical.
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