Alan Turing — "If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then w…"
If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be?
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More from Alan Turing
"It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some…"
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote poses a direct challenge about the consequences of creating truly thinking machines. If a machine can think at all, nothing limits its intelligence to human levels—it could surpass us entirely. The phrase 'where should we be?' captures genuine uncertainty about humanity's place and purpose in a world where we are no longer the most intelligent entities. It is an early, precise framing of what we now call artificial general intelligence risk.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' proposed the Turing Test to assess machine thought, proving he took this question seriously. Having broken the Enigma cipher at Bletchley Park using mechanical computation, he understood firsthand what machines could achieve. This quote reflects his characteristic intellectual honesty: not cheerleading for AI's promise but genuinely reckoning with its implications for human relevance and control—concerns central to his philosophy of mind.
The era
In the early 1950s, electronic computers were barely public, and scientists were only beginning to grasp their potential. Norbert Wiener's 'Cybernetics' (1948) had just opened serious debates about machine intelligence and human control. Cold War pressures were accelerating computing research while the idea of a machine outthinking humans felt both newly conceivable and deeply unsettling. Turing's question arrived precisely when it first crossed from pure speculation into legitimate scientific possibility.
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