Alan Turing — "It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would no…"
It seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers and would take control.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Once a machine becomes capable of genuine thinking, it will rapidly surpass human intelligence. Our cognitive limitations become irrelevant at that point, and the machine—not humanity—takes the dominant role. This is a frank warning that artificial minds, once ignited, follow their own trajectory beyond human oversight or ability to compete with them.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing invented the theoretical foundations of computation and asked formally whether machines could think. Having cracked Enigma and built early computing hardware, he understood better than anyone how mechanical processes could execute tasks humans struggle with. This quote reflects his sober, unsentimental view that logic and speed, not emotion, determine who controls the future.
The era
Written in the early 1950s, just as the first stored-program computers came online and the Cold War arms race accelerated, Turing's warning arrived before mainstream society had any framework for AI risk. Governments were racing to harness computing for cryptography and warfare, making the prospect of uncontrollable machine intelligence an immediate strategic concern, not science fiction.
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