Alan Turing — "I have had a number of conversations with people who are convinced that machines…"
I have had a number of conversations with people who are convinced that machines cannot think. I have not been convinced by their arguments.
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More from Alan Turing
"We are trying to create a machine that can solve problems."
"The human mind is a pattern-matching machine."
"The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction."
"Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's?"
"We are trying to construct a machine which will be able to do everything that a man can do."
Details
Attributed, general implication from his writings, but exact quote is elusive.
Date: Approx. 1950
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Turing is pushing back against confident dismissals of machine intelligence. He's not claiming machines definitely can think — he's saying the arguments he's heard against it are unconvincing. It's a stance of intellectual precision: refusing to accept philosophical conviction as a substitute for rigorous reasoning. He treats the question as genuinely open, requiring better evidence and argument, not assumption.
Relevance to Alan Turing
In 1950, Turing published "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," proposing what became the Turing Test — a behavioral benchmark for machine cognition. During WWII he built electromechanical Bombe machines that cracked Enigma by automating logical inference. His entire career demonstrated machines doing things once thought exclusively human. When critics insisted machines couldn't think, Turing had direct evidence from his own work that made their certainty look unfounded.
The era
The early 1950s produced the first stored-program computers — Manchester Baby (1948), EDSAC, early IBM systems. Most academics and the public still viewed computers as elaborate calculators, not potential minds. Philosophy of mind, split between behaviorism and Cartesian dualism, largely excluded machines from consciousness by definition. Cold War military investment accelerated computing, yet serious discussion of machine intelligence was treated as science fiction rather than legitimate inquiry.
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