Alan Turing — "If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent."
If a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.
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More from Alan Turing
"We are not interested in the fact that a machine can solve a problem, but in the fact that it can solve a problem that we cannot."
"This is only a foretaste of what is to come, and only the shadow of what is going to be."
"We are building a brain."
"The human mind is a complex adaptive system."
"The game of cricket is one such example of a game which can be played against the computer."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Genuine intelligence requires the capacity to make mistakes. A system designed to never fail is operating within rigidly fixed rules — it cannot learn, adapt, or reason beyond its constraints. Real thinking involves uncertainty, trial and error, and the possibility of being wrong. Infallibility and intelligence are fundamentally incompatible because learning only happens when errors are possible.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent WWII breaking Enigma at Bletchley Park, knowing even his Bombe machine produced wrong answers requiring human judgment to filter. His 1950 Turing Test paper explicitly argued machines must be allowed to make mistakes to appear intelligent. He championed machine learning over hardcoded rules, believing programmed perfection was the opposite of thought.
The era
In the late 1940s and 1950s, early computers were celebrated as perfect calculators — deterministic, error-free arithmetic engines. The idea of a fallible machine was considered a defect, not a feature. Turing's provocative inversion challenged prevailing assumptions at the dawn of computing, anticipating the entire field of artificial intelligence decades before it existed as a discipline.
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