The Turing Test, 1950: The Question That Still Has No Answer

The Turing Test, 1950: The Question That Still Has No Answer A Provocative Afternoon in Oxford Let’s set the scene: October 1950, Oxford. The philosophy journal Mind has just published a new issue. Nestled among its essays is a paper by Alan Turing—a thirty-eight-year-old mathematician whose wartime codebreaking was still secret, but whose reputation was already formidable. The paper is titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," and it opens with the sort of question that you can’t read without pausing: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'" There’s no new math here. No shiny experiments or schematics. It’s a thought experiment—a careful, logical exploration of a question that seems simple, but turns out to be anything but. The field we now call artificial intelligence doesn’t even exist yet; nobody knows what to do with this paper. Turing’s question feels premature, maybe even confused. Fast forward seventy-five years. Turing’s paper has become the philosophic