Alan Turing — "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' This should begin with…"
I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?' This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms 'machine' and 'think.'
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Before debating whether artificial intelligence is real, we must first agree on what 'machine' and 'think' actually mean. This is a scientist's demand for definitional clarity before philosophical inquiry — vague questions only produce vague answers. Without pinning down what counts as thinking, any claim that machines can or cannot think remains meaningless. Precise definitions are the prerequisite for honest investigation.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing published this in his landmark 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence,' where he proposed what became the Turing Test. His entire career exemplified rigorous definitional thinking — formalizing computation through the theoretical Turing machine, breaking Enigma codes through systematic logic at Bletchley Park. He believed ambiguous language masked real problems; precision in framing questions was, for him, the first step toward answering them.
The era
Written in 1950, just five years after WWII, as the first programmable computers — ENIAC, Manchester Mark 1 — were barely operational. Most scientists still saw machines as mechanical calculators, nothing more. The Cold War was accelerating computing's military importance, yet the philosophical question of machine intelligence seemed outlandish to mainstream science. Turing's framing forced the entire field to take artificial intelligence seriously as a legitimate area of inquiry.
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