I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent. chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.
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"Mother has been staying here, and we seem to be getting on a good deal better. I have been subjecting her to a good deal of sexual enlightenment and she seems to have stood up to it very well. There w…"
"The question is not whether machines can think, but whether they can do something that we would call thinking."
"The original question, 'Can machines think?' I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion."
"A machine does not have to be conscious to be intelligent."
"I am not a believer in the idea that the human mind is something supernatural."
From his paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence', published in the journal Mind.
Date: 1950
PhilosophicalFound in 1 providers: gemini
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Within fifty years, computers will be programmable to convincingly mimic human conversation so well that a person questioning both a machine and a human for five minutes would correctly identify which is which only 70% of the time — barely better than chance. Machines, given enough memory and programming, can approximate human-level conversational intelligence in ways that blur the line between artificial and genuine thought.
Turing wrote this in his landmark 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' which introduced the Turing Test. As the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, and having cracked Nazi Enigma codes at Bletchley Park, Turing understood machines' logical potential intimately. This prediction reflects his conviction that intelligence is fundamentally computational — a radical belief during an era when computers filled rooms and barely solved arithmetic.
In 1950, the first stored-program computers had just emerged — ENIAC and Manchester Mark 1 existed but had kilobytes of memory, not the billion bytes Turing predicted. Cold War tensions made computing a military priority. Most scientists viewed machines as pure calculators, incapable of thought. Turing's proposal that machine intelligence was achievable and measurable was philosophically explosive, challenging religious, philosophical, and scientific assumptions about what made humans unique.
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