Alan Turing — "We are trying to construct a machine which will be able to do everything that a …"
We are trying to construct a machine which will be able to do everything that a man can do.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Alan Turing
"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'."
"The computer is a new medium for human expression."
"The question is not whether machines can think, but whether they can be made to think like humans."
"The idea of a 'thinking machine' is not so absurd as it seems."
"Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition."
Verification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
The quote expresses the ultimate ambition of machine intelligence: building a system capable of matching every human cognitive ability — not just arithmetic or rote tasks, but reasoning, creativity, language, and judgment. It frames artificial intelligence not as narrow automation but as full cognitive parity, directly challenging the deeply held assumption that human thought is uniquely irreducible to any mechanical or computational process.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing's 1950 paper 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence' posed 'Can machines think?' and introduced the imitation game, now called the Turing Test. His Universal Turing Machine theory proved one device could simulate any computation. At Bletchley Park, he demonstrated machines could tackle complex, human-seeming pattern recognition. Turing believed intelligence was purely functional — given the right program, any machine could replicate any mental process, making him the founder of AI.
The era
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, computers were enormous single-purpose machines filling entire rooms, used mainly for ballistics and census calculations. The idea of a general-purpose thinking machine was radical and widely dismissed. Post-WWII scientists were only beginning to grasp what computation could achieve. Most philosophers and engineers believed human reasoning was uniquely unmechanizable, making Turing's flat assertion that machines could equal human capability genuinely shocking.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].