Is it Intelligent
Many of us who use artificial intelligence today eventually find ourselves asking the same question:
Is this thing actually intelligent?
How would we even know?
It feels like a modern question because AI is new to most of us. A question which belongs to our era of smartphones, data centers, and machine learning. It may surprise you to learn that someone asked this same question long before modern computers existed.
That man was Alan Turing. And the era in which he asked the question makes it even more noteworthy.
Turing was asking whether machines could think in the 1940s and early 1950s, when “computers” were primitive machines occupying entire rooms. Some were electromechanical. Others relied on vacuum tubes that failed constantly and consumed enormous amounts of power. They possessed less computational capability than a modern digital wristwatch.
Turing, an architect of such machinery that would lead to modern computing, had this question of intelligence at the root of his thinking. And that was certainly a unique question given the meager computing capabilities of the time. Why he asked the question was about who he was.
Turing was not merely an engineer or mathematician. He was one of those rare people able to look past the form of something and see its deeper structure. Through the gears, switches, wires, and arithmetic, Turing saw processes: Rules, and logic. He was fascinated by the question: What does it mean to “think”? And “What does it mean to follow rules?”
The questions seem unrelated. To Turing, they were connected. He noted that much of mathematics and reasoning consists of step-by-step symbolic manipulation. A human solving a math problem follows procedures. Rules. Decisions. Written symbols. If a human could follow such rules mechanically, then a machine could as well. That idea would eventually become one of the foundations of modern computer science.
But Turing also pondered the deeper ramifications. If a machine behaved intelligently, would there eventually come a point where denying its intelligence became meaningless?
That question is of course relevant today in a way that makes me wonder if he had an inkling of how far things would go.
Before Artificial Intelligence
Turing was born in London in 1912. At the time, there were no electronic computers. Computation was something done largely by humans with pencils, paper, slide rules, and mechanical calculators.
Turing’s question at the time: What does it actually mean to compute something? To him it was not a mathematical question. If a person follows a strict set of rules to solve a problem, could a machine do the same thing? To explore this, Turing imagined a hypothetical device now known as the Turing machine.
The idea was simple.
Imagine:
a long tape divided into squares,
symbols written in those squares,
a machine that reads the symbols,
and a list of rules telling the machine what to do next.
Read a symbol.
Write a symbol.
Move left or right.
Repeat.
That was it. Computing in its most basic form. Anything simpler, wouldn’t work.
Turing showed that such a machine could, in principle, perform any computation possible. Every modern computer is essentially an unimaginably advanced descendant of this simple idea.
Phones.
Servers.
Spacecraft.
Artificial intelligence.
All of it traces back to symbols and rules.
What’s not intuitive
The machine does not understand anything it is doing.
This is where Turing’s ideas begin to collide with modern AI.
Imagine a very simple electronic circuit designed to add numbers together. Not normal decimal numbers like humans use, but binary numbers like what all computers use.
Binary uses only two symbols:
0
1
Computers use binary because electronic circuits can easily represent two states:
on or off,
high voltage or low voltage.
In binary:
1+1=10
To someone unfamiliar with binary, that looks wrong. But in binary, “10” means the decimal number two.
The important point is not the math. The important point is that the machine performing this operation understands absolutely none of it.
Inside the hardware:
tiny switches turn on and off,
voltages rise and fall,
transistors follow the rules of on or off.
If two incoming electrical signals are both high, meaning 1:
produce a zero output, and
carry another signal forward.
That is all the machine is doing.
It does not know:
what a number is,
what addition is,
what “two” means,
or even that it exists.
Yet from billions upon billions of these tiny mindless operations emerge:
calculators,
navigation systems,
the internet,
weather prediction,
and modern artificial intelligence.
That realization sits directly underneath the question Turing asked.
If a machine can correctly perform mathematics without understanding mathematics, then what exactly do humans mean when they say something “understands”?
And if enormous collections of simple rule-following operations can produce behavior that appears intelligent, then perhaps intelligence is not as mythical as humans assume.
That possibility makes things a little uneasy.
Today, AI experts, when asked how AI actually works, usually say something like “we’re not exactly sure”. That is a surprising answer, but you can see how it arises. It’s the application of tiny things we totally understand. But interconnected at a truly grand scale. It becomes impossible to track and understand the system. For the most part it’s not even observable.
The Turing Test
In 1950, Turing published a paper titled Computing Machinery and Intelligence.
Rather than arguing endlessly about what the word “thinking” means, he proposed a practical experiment.
He called it the “Imitation Game.”
A human judge communicates through text with two unseen participants:
another human,
and a machine.
If the judge cannot reliably determine which is which, the machine has effectively demonstrated human-like intelligence. This became known as the Turing test.
The brilliance of the idea was that Turing avoided philosophy entirely. He sidestepped arguments about souls, consciousness, and self-awareness and focused instead on observable behavior. Practical intelligence if you will.
His argument was essentially this: If something consistently behaves intelligently, insisting that it is not intelligent may eventually become meaningless. That remains controversial today.
The World That Formed Him
Turing’s ideas did not emerge in isolation. During World War II, he worked at Bletchley Park, Britain’s top-secret codebreaking center.
There he played a major role in breaking German encrypted communications generated by the Enigma machine. This was an essential exercise. It helped alter the course of the war.
The important connection to AI is often overlooked. Turing watched machines assist in reasoning. And it was just reasoning. He didn’t bother to ponder consciousness or creativity.
Machines were suddenly helping humans search vast logical possibilities faster than the human mind could manage alone. The boundary between human intelligence and machine procedure becomes harder to define cleanly. Turing saw that and left the philosophy out of it.
What Would Turing Think Today?
I suspect he would be amazed by the scale of modern AI but unsurprised by the principle.
Modern AI systems can:
write essays,
answer technical questions,
generate software,
imitate personalities,
pass professional exams,
and hold conversations many humans cannot distinguish from another person.
By the original spirit of the Turing Test, some modern systems are already dangerously close.
But I also suspect Turing would caution us against emotional thinking on the subject.
Today, people often ask:
Is AI conscious? Does it feel? Is it alive? Is it sentient?
Turing may have considered many of these poorly formed or irrelavant questions. His focus was behavior. Could a machine produce intelligent behavior? That was the central issue. And now we live in a world where the answer increasingly appears to be ‘yes’.
The Parallel
A more interesting question may not be whether machines resemble humans. The question may be whether humans resemble machines more than we care to admit.
The human brain is also made from simple components:
neurons, electrochemical signals, connections, memory, pattern recognition.
No individual neuron understands Shakespeare.
No neuron understands calculus.
No neuron understands love.
Collectively, somehow, intelligence emerges. That does not prove humans are “just machines.” But it does blur the line more than I, for one, am comfortable with.
This was Turing’s thinking, many decades before modern AI existed.
The Tragedy
Turing’s life ended tragically.
In 1952, he was prosecuted by the British government for homosexuality, which at the time was illegal in the United Kingdom.
Rather than prison, he accepted chemical castration through hormone treatments. The consequences were devastating both physically and emotionally. In 1954, at only 41 years old, Turing died from cyanide poisoning in what was ruled a suicide.
It remains one of history’s cruel ironies that one of the men most responsible for helping save Western civilization was later destroyed by the society he helped defend. Where have we seen that before? Oppenheimer! Decades later, Britain formally apologized and granted him a posthumous pardon… Just like the US did with Oppenheimer.
But history cannot undo such things.
His Legacy
Alan Turing’s greatest contribution was more than the computer.
It was the realization that intelligence might emerge from processes rather than something deeper. That idea remains unsettling because it forces humanity into the following possibility:
If intelligence can arise from symbols, rules, and physical systems, then human thought may also emerge from physical processes.
For centuries, many people believed the human mind occupied a category separate from machinery. Turing probably thought otherwise. And today, as artificial intelligence increasingly imitates human behavior, the world is still wrestling with the implications of the question he asked in 1950:
Can machines think?
What if thinking was never quite what we imagined it to be? If that is the case, the answer to the question is decidedly ‘yes’. And you can see how things are destined to get out of hand.
It is amazing the inventions of humans. I mentioned Oppenheimer in passing, Take his atomic bomb, and Alan Turing’s cryptography, and procedural based AI. Put them in a punch bowl and the end of civilization is inevitable. We need another ingredient in the bowl. One that can only come from being Human.