The isolated man does not develop any intellectual power. It is necessary for him to be immersed in an environment of other men, whose techniques he absorbs during the first twenty years of his life.
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"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."
"I am not interested in whether a machine can think, but in whether it can make me think."
"A machine does not have to be conscious to be intelligent."
"If the man were to try and pretend to be the machine he would clearly make a very poor showing. He would be given away at once by slowness and inaccuracy in arithmetic."
"I have had a dream indicating rather clearly that I am on the way to being hetero, though I don't accept it with much enthusiasm either awake or in the dreams."
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Human intelligence isn't innate — it's built through immersion in society. A person cut off from other humans won't develop real intellectual capacity because learning happens by absorbing the accumulated techniques, habits of mind, and knowledge of those around you. The first two decades of life are critical: that's when a person soaks up the cultural and cognitive toolkit that makes sophisticated thinking possible. Intelligence is fundamentally social.
Turing wrote this in his landmark 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," where he probed whether machines could think. If human intelligence depends on social absorption over decades, replicating it mechanically is extraordinarily hard. Turing thrived in collaborative environments — Bletchley Park's codebreaking teams, Cambridge's mathematical culture — yet lived in profound social isolation due to his criminalized homosexuality, giving this observation an unmistakably painful personal dimension.
In 1950, computing was newborn — Turing's Manchester Mark 1 was among the world's first stored-program computers. Machine intelligence was suddenly urgent and controversial. Simultaneously, developmental psychology was advancing: how children learn and what makes humans cognitively unique were live debates. Post-WWII Britain emphasized rebuilding institutions and education. Turing's framing of intelligence as socially transmitted challenged both the romantic myth of the lone genius and naive optimism about thinking machines.
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