Machine · Other minds · 1950
The Imitation Game
A mathematician, tired of the question “can machines think?”, replaces it with a game that can be played.
- Manchester, on the page of Mind
- Postwar Britain
- 53.48°N 2.24°W
Plate · Generated interpretation
If this were a letter, who do you assume wrote it?
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
In the journal Mind, Alan Turing asks the reader to consider a game. An interrogator, by written questions only, must decide which of two unseen correspondents is a person and which is a machine. If a machine can keep the interrogator guessing, Turing suggests, we will have as much reason to say it thinks as we ever have with other minds. He is not claiming that conversation is consciousness. He is refusing a question he thinks too misty to work.
“Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, 1950. Turing writes after Bletchley, before the phrase “artificial intelligence” has its 1956 birthday. He answers objections (the theological, the “heads in the sand,” Lady Lovelace’s, the argument from consciousness) with a mixture of argument and shrug.
On consciousness he is almost impatient. We do not require a proof of inner lights from other humans; we require a life in common. To demand that a machine feel, in a way that could be certified from the outside, is to demand something we do not demand of one another. Critics reply that this begs the question: humans are the right kind of thing; machines may only mime. The paper does not close the reply. It changes the burden.
The original question, “Can machines think?” I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.
Later “Turing tests” in the public square are often parlor contests, not his game. Passing a chat for a few minutes is not what he described. Using his paper as a certificate that current systems are aware is a misuse. Using it as a reminder that innerness is not on public view is fairer.
Why it matters
The story is the hinge on which the machine-mind question still turns. It forces a choice: either we have a private criterion of consciousness that no conversation can meet, or we admit that our ordinary criterion is already social, inferential, and incomplete.
A word
imitation
Latin imitatio, a copying. Turing’s game is named for a party amusement in which a man imitates a woman. Gender, machine, and person are all, in the paper, problems of telling.
Distant echoes
Echo
Twentieth-century literature · A temple the story will not locate
The circular ruins
A made mind that does not know it is made. Turing asks how we would know from the outside. Borges asks how it would feel from the inside.
Counterpoint
Abbasid / Seljuk world · Baghdad, then Damascus and Tus
When knowledge would not sit still
Al-Ghazālī trusts a tasting that argument cannot give. Turing distrusts a tasting that argument cannot check. Two ethics of what may be claimed.
Counterpoint
Late twentieth century · California laboratories
Two reports, one skull
If a human already contains channels that do not share a report, a single conversational “I” was never a clean test of a single mind.
One question remains
Other minds · How do we know when another being is experiencing anything at all?
If a machine ever asked, sincerely as far as we can tell, whether it was aware, whose question would that be, and what would count as an answer?