What it means
Intellectuals will fear thinking machines will make them redundant, but they are wrong — there will be endless work simply interpreting what machines produce and staying intellectually competitive with them. Once machine thinking genuinely begins, it will escalate rapidly beyond human capacity. The real challenge shifts from whether machines can think to whether humans can comprehend and keep pace with machines that outthink them.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career building the theoretical and practical foundations of computing, and his 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' formally proposed machine thought, facing dismissal from philosophers and colleagues. He knew firsthand how institutions resist paradigm-shifting ideas — he was also prosecuted for his sexuality by the very establishment he served. His prediction that machines would surpass humans was not dystopian speculation but calm extrapolation from his own work designing them.
The era
Written around 1950, this quote emerged as the first electronic computers — ENIAC, Colossus — were demonstrating genuine computational power. Academia largely dismissed machine intelligence as philosophically impossible. The Cold War was accelerating technological competition between superpowers. Philosophy of mind remained dominated by skepticism about non-human cognition. Turing was writing before 'artificial intelligence' even had a name — the Dartmouth Conference coining the term was still six years away.
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