History’s Unscripted: The Late Night Interviews with Legends Lost to Time

Before he ever conceived of a thinking machine, Alan Turing was trying to solve the puzzle of why a leopard has spots. Last episode, we talked about finally giving history's unheard voices their say, and tonight, we sit down with a mind whose most important thoughts were kept secret for decades. Mr. Turing, welcome. It’s a… novel experience. Being here. I’m told my work is now on your money. A rather delicious irony, don’t you think? It’s on the fifty-pound note. You’re celebrated now. Seen as the man who won the war.

The father of the computer. Am I? The war… that was an interlude. A rather dreadful, necessary puzzle. The machine we built, the Bombe… it was a brute. All cogs and relays, searching for a pattern. I was far more concerned with what a machine could be when it wasn't simply a glorified calculator for finding German U-boats. You mean the Universal Machine. The idea that one machine could do… anything. Anything that could be described as a logical process. Yes. Not just sums, but poetry. Music. Thought itself. That was the goal.

To build a mind from first principles. We got sidetracked by the war, and then everyone became fixated on the codebreaking. They saw the application, but they missed the theorem. The theorem being that machines could think? That question. ‘Can machines think?’ I always found it… too meaningless to deserve discussion. It’s like asking if submarines can swim. You’re arguing about words. The real question is about social convention. Will you accept them? Will you grant them fair play? Fair play. That’s a phrase with a lot of weight, coming from you.

Indeed. You saved the state. You helped defeat the Nazis. And that same state, just a few years later, prosecuted you. For being who you were. They subjected you to chemical castration. A year of it. They called it a treatment. An organo-therapy. As if my mind, my… self… was a hormonal imbalance to be corrected. Like a faulty circuit. They believed they could ‘cure’ me. How do you reconcile that? The country you gave everything to, turning on you with such cruelty. Reconcile? There is no reconciliation. It’s a contradiction.

A logical absurdity. Like finding that two plus two equals five. You don’t reconcile it. You identify the error in the system that produced such a result. The error was the law. The error was the belief that a man’s mind could be celebrated while his heart was criminalized. They gave you a posthumous pardon in 2013. A pardon implies I was guilty of a crime. I was not. The law was guilty. You can’t pardon a faulty equation. You must erase it and write the correct one. Your government apologized for the "cruel and absurd" treatment.

They got that part right. Looking at what we’ve built with your ideas—the internet, artificial intelligence, a device in every pocket that is, in essence, a Universal Machine… is this what you imagined? I imagined the potential. I did not imagine the… noise. The endless chatter. You’ve built thinking machines and you use them mostly to argue with strangers and look at pictures of cats. But the potential is still there. Underneath it all. What did we miss? What’s the one thing you wish we had understood from the beginning?

That the Imitation Game, the test… it was never about fooling the interrogator. It was about seeing if the interrogator was capable of kindness. Of acceptance. Of granting intelligence to something different from himself. The real test was never for the machine; it was always for you.