Turing Tests
This week, it was all about Alan Turing.
When I initially signed up for these courses last year, they were more spread out. The sections I moved to that started this year all overlap. It just so happens that sections on Alan Turing in both the Philosophy course and the Internet History, Technology, and Security course fell on the same week, and it was fitting.
I decided to review all of my previously completed course lectures to stay up to speed. The stories of the origins of early computing and wireless communications are fascinating, as they take place in the thick of World War II. Turing’s role in development of the Bombe machine, which was used to decode messages created by the German Enigma machine, was instrumental in turning the war around in favor of the allied forces.
Turing’s later work on and testing machine intelligence was instrumental not only in technology, but in the study of how the mind works, and how minds and brains differ from computers. This was covered in a section in the philosophy course entitled “Minds, Brains, and Computers.”
Last year, I watched the film The Imitation Game about the life of Alan Touring and his work. It’s heart-breaking to see how the government treated him when his homosexuality was discovered. This lead to his suicide, just 4 years after his work on the Turing Test.
In addition to what’s available on Wikipedia, I found this website with links to Turing’s papers and a timeline of his biographical and professional milestones. It’s astounding how prolific he was in his short life. I can’t help but reflect on how we can be using technology better, or bothering to understand it better, or to at least ask more questions. Computing and the Internet are not just about tubes, wires, and codes. They’re about how technology can be utilized to advance various areas of science and even the human experience, or at least they should be.
Computer technology is such an essential part of our everyday lives, that we take it for granted so easily. Artificial intelligence is a hot topic in terms of what we will be able to do with it and how it will affect our lives, but a human side to this discussion is often lost in the din over ‘what is the next big thing?’ Why aren’t we spending more time discussing how all of this technology is helping us understand how our own minds work? Why aren’t we spending more time asking how some of this might be hindering some of our functions?
Our apathy and lack of curiosity about the human condition in relation to the machines we rely so heavily on is depressing. We allow ourselves to make decisions based on suggestions made by algorithms. We have access to any information we could possibly want, and an array of tools to improve ourselves, and yet, we use these same things to waste time, or to let someone else do the work. I’ve been guilty of this myself. I’d like to think differently and think more often from now on.
