Abstract
Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” published in 1950, is one of the founding texts in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), although the term was not coined until 1958, 4 years after his death. From the treatment of human intelligence as computational and the brain as mechanical to the comparison of animals to machines to the disregard for the materiality of computers to programming as a stand-in for procreation to fiction-inspired science, many of the core tenets that have shaped the field of AI have their origins in Turing’s paper. A close analysis of the paper exposes some of the problematic logic underlying these tenets that are now proving damaging for both society and the planet.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Karen Asp for her insightful comments on an earlier draft. I would also like to thank Social Science and Humanities Research Council for a grant that helped to fund this research.
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Heffernan, T. The imitation game, the “child machine,” and the fathers of AI. AI & Soc 39, 353–357 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01512-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01512-0