Alan Turing — "At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control."
At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control.
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More from Alan Turing
"A computer is a universal machine, capable of carrying out any calculation that can be performed by a human."
"Up to a point, it is better to just let the snags [bugs] be there than to spend such time in design that there are none."
"The machine should be able to learn for itself."
"There are many questions which we shall have to answer, for example, what is the nature of consciousness?"
"I'm afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future. Turing believes machines think. Turing lies with men. Therefore machines do not think. Yours in distress, Alan."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
At some point, machines will inevitably surpass human control and begin directing outcomes themselves. This isn't framed as catastrophe but as logical progression — if machines can think, learn, and improve, human oversight becomes a temporary condition rather than a permanent arrangement. The shift from tool to autonomous agent is presented as an expected milestone, not a distant fantasy.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career asking whether machines could think, most famously in his 1950 paper introducing the Turing Test. Having built Colossus-era computing infrastructure and theorized universal machines, he understood better than anyone that intelligence — once instantiated in hardware — follows its own trajectory. This quote reflects his unsentimental, mathematical view of machine capability as a continuum, not a hard boundary.
The era
Written in the early 1950s, this emerged when the first stored-program computers were just becoming operational. The Cold War created urgent pressure to automate calculation, code-breaking, and logistics. Most people still viewed computers as glorified calculators. Turing's warning was therefore radical — he was projecting decades ahead while colleagues debated whether machines could even do arithmetic reliably.
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