I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.
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"The human mind is a very powerful computer."
"The human brain is a very complex machine, but it is still a machine."
"The activity of the intuition consists in making spontaneous judgements which are not the result of conscious trains of reasoning. These judgments are often but by no means invariably correct…"
"The machine has a definite state at any moment, which is determined by the instructions it has received and by the results of its previous operations."
"The computer is a tool for extending the human intellect."
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By 2000, the phrase 'machines thinking' will be unremarkable — cultural attitudes and vocabulary will have shifted enough that nobody argues against it. Turing isn't claiming machines already think; he's predicting a future where the question gets resolved not by proof but by consensus. It's as much a forecast about changing human minds as about advancing technology itself.
Written in his 1950 paper introducing the Turing Test, this reflects Turing's lifelong habit of defending radical positions with quiet confidence. He spent WWII proving machines could outperform human codebreakers on Enigma. Simultaneously prosecuted for homosexuality by a society hostile to his identity, he understood firsthand how entrenched opinion could shift — and believed it would.
In 1950, 'thinking machines' was fringe speculation. ENIAC had existed five years; the Manchester Mark 1 ran its first program in 1948. Most philosophers and scientists dismissed machine thought as a category error. Cybernetics was just emerging; AI didn't exist as a discipline. Turing was staking a calm, long-range claim against near-universal establishment skepticism at the literal birth of computing.
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