It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers… They would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits. At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control.
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"It is possible for a machine to have a memory in the sense that a human being has a memory."
"There are many questions which we shall have to answer, for example, what is the nature of consciousness?"
"No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm interested in is a moderately trained brain. The kind that would be useful in daily life."
"The question is not whether machines can think, but whether they can be made to think like humans."
"One day ladies will take their computers for walks in the park and tell each other, 'My little computer said such a funny thing this morning'."
Submitted to the National Physical Laboratory in 1948 ("Intelligent Machinery") and a BBC radio lecture in 1951. Also mentioned in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".
Date: 1948-1951
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Once machines begin genuine thinking, they'll rapidly surpass human cognitive abilities, then communicate with each other, sharpening their intelligence through interaction. Eventually, humans lose meaningful control. Turing describes what we now call recursive self-improvement and the intelligence explosion: a threshold where machine cognition becomes self-sustaining and autonomous, leaving humans unable to supervise or constrain it. A precise early articulation of what AI researchers today call the alignment problem and superintelligence risk.
Turing invented the theoretical computer and formalized machine intelligence in his landmark 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, which introduced the Turing Test. His entire career was built on asking whether machines could genuinely think. Having broken Nazi Enigma codes using proto-computers at Bletchley Park, he understood machines as powerful cognitive tools. His willingness to follow this logic to its disturbing conclusion - machines taking control - reflects his characteristic intellectual honesty, unconstrained by social convention or fear of controversy.
Turing likely made this statement around 1951, when the first operational computers - Manchester Mark 1, EDSAC - had just come online as room-filling machines performing basic arithmetic. The atomic bomb had demonstrated that human-created tools could threaten civilization itself. No field of AI ethics existed. Yet the Cold War created urgent pressure to push computing forward. His warning was genuinely prophetic: issued when machine thinking was still largely theoretical, decades before it became a mainstream concern.
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