Alan Turing — "We are building a brain."
We are building a brain.
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More from Alan Turing
"The human brain is a very complex machine, but it is still a machine."
"The process of learning is a very complex one."
"I am not afraid of computers. I am afraid of the people who program them."
"The human brain has a finite number of states, and so it can be simulated by a finite state machine."
"We are not interested in the fact that the machine can do well, but in the fact that it can do badly."
Details
Referring to the ACE computer project, as quoted in 'Alan Turing: The Enigma' by Andrew Hodges.
Date: 1946
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Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote captures a radical ambition: that a machine could replicate not just calculation but thought itself. Turing asserts that intelligence is not mystical or uniquely biological — it is a process that can be engineered. The word 'brain' reframes the computer from a calculator into a mind, challenging assumptions about what separates human cognition from mechanical process. The plural 'we' signals a collective scientific enterprise, not a lone inventor's fantasy.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career dissolving the boundary between mind and machine. His 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' asked 'Can machines think?' and proposed the Turing Test. He designed the ACE computer at the National Physical Laboratory and theorized universal machines capable of simulating any computation. His Bletchley Park codebreaking demonstrated machines amplifying human cognition under pressure. He believed the brain was, at bottom, a computable system — this quote is that belief distilled.
The era
The late 1940s saw the first real electronic computers — ENIAC (1945), Manchester Baby (1948) — emerge from wartime necessity. The Cold War created urgent demand for computation in cryptography and weapons. Society was awed by atomic power and scientific possibility, yet most people still saw computers as glorified calculators. Turing's framing of 'building a brain' was provocative: it suggested machines would eventually rival human minds, a concept the era found both thrilling and deeply unsettling.
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