Alan Turing — "I am not interested in whether a machine can think, but in whether it can make m…"
I am not interested in whether a machine can think, but in whether it can make me think.
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More from Alan Turing
"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."
"A man provided with paper, pencil, and rubber, and subject to strict discipline, is in effect a universal machine."
"The idea of a 'soul' is a philosophical concept, not a scientific one."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The value of intelligence — artificial or otherwise — lies not in the process itself but in the effect it has on others. A thinking machine matters only if it provokes deeper questions, insights, or ideas in the human interacting with it. Utility is measured by intellectual stimulation produced, not by internal mechanism or capability alone.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career asking whether machines could replicate human thought, most famously through the Turing Test. Yet his deeper drive was always human understanding — cracking Enigma to save lives, building theoretical foundations others would think through for decades. He cared about what computation revealed about minds, not computation as an end.
The era
In the 1940s–50s, computing emerged from wartime necessity into peacetime possibility. Society debated whether machines were tools or something more. Turing worked when 'computer' still meant a person doing arithmetic. His era demanded justification for expensive, room-sized machines — their worth measured entirely by what problems they helped humans solve.
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