Turing's 1950 Paper: Can Machines Think?

In 1950, Alan Turing published Computing Machinery and Intelligence in the philosophy journal Mind. He opened with the question, can machines think? Then he argued the question was too slippery to answer directly.

Instead, Turing proposed replacing it with a practical test: the imitation game. If a human judge, chatting by text with a hidden machine and a hidden human, cannot reliably tell them apart, we might as well call the machine intelligent.

Objections Turing anticipated

• The theological objection: only God grants souls to thinking beings
• The heads-in-the-sand objection: it would be too awful if machines could think
• Lady Lovelace's objection: machines only do what we tell them
• The argument from consciousness: machines cannot feel

Turing answered each one, often with wit. He predicted that by the year 2000, machines would have enough memory to play the imitation game well enough to fool an average interrogator for five minutes.

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

The big idea: Turing gave the field a workable starting point by trading the hard question for a testable one. That trade still shapes how we evaluate models today.