The Turing Point

Note: In this book, there are discussions about racism / sexism / homophobia / ableism / suicide / mental illness etc. It’s still worth reading, but beware.

《Reflections of Alan Turing》, written by Dermot Turing, was overall good. Despite disagreeing with some of the author’s opinions, I find it’s a great book about how we should celebrate Alan Turing’s life.

This book mostly follows Alan Turing’s life, and it is a biography, but it’s an unusual kind of. For example, this book starts with chronicle of Alan’s ancestors, who were mostly the civil servants of British Empire, and the fact that a member of the family got unpersoned and blocked from getting civil service job because he was half-Indian. Then the Turing family history intertwines with the discussion about colonial racism, a classics-centric culture that regards science and engineering as a second-class job, and Alan and his brother’s life story and so on.

Most of the biographical parts are well known from various other biographies, but the author makes it fresh by adding some new primary sources about Alan’s life (namely, the 2017 discovery of Alan Turing’s letters with various correspondents in Manchester University, and digitally restored letter which Alan’s mother had censored) and providing new perspective on his life as a family member. In fact, there are several memoirs from John Turing (Alan’s brother) in this book, and it shows starkly contrasted lifestyle of him (whose were more empire-aligning and socially accepted) and Alan (whose were rather messy and liberal).

This book is not just about Alan Turing’s life. It’s also about the whole family’s story(including the author), about today’s IT society and its technology, about the society’s conception of Alan Turing, and its distortion of the history. The book doesn’t end with Alan Turing’s death, it ends after checking society’s posthumous treatment of him.

This book published in 2021 means that it covers his pardon(which the author criticizes for several things), 《The Imitation Game》 (also which the author criticizes several times in the book, each time with different context), the “Alan Turing Law”(again which the author criticizes for treating dead people much better than living people), and the 50 pounds note thing.

And Then the book ends with agendas to remember and celebrate Alan Turing’s life such as equal representation and opportunity for women and POCs in STEMS, doing something with countries which still have anti-gay laws, banning conversion therapy, protection for online privacy, checking on AI bias, etc. It’s a long social commentary as well as a biography.

Now I said I disagree with some of the author’s opinions. There are few, and most of them are minor ones (at least I feel so, I saw more ridiculous opinions more often on the Internet.) But there is a discussion about Alan Turing and autism, and while the author is not entirely dismissive about the topic, I think some of the reasoning comes from stereotypes from very neurotypical perspectives.

After all, we want representation not because the represented is ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’, but because they are ‘part of the society’. Strangely, when it comes to the representation of neurodiversity, many people dismiss it as a ‘hopeful thought that one can be an extraordinary example’. (Cue Benedict Cumberbatch’s comment about ‘giving false hope’) In that regard, that specific part was kinda disappointing. But also, just as expected. (I have low expectation)

the original “turing test” paper is so beautiful.  more beautiful, i imagine, than most expect going in—he’s got this underlying warm humanism and gentle humor throughout.  (it’s present even in his more technical papers, but it shines here)

and the section that slays me each time is this:

“It will not be possible to apply exactly the same teaching process to the machine as to a normal child. It will not, for instance, be provided with legs, so that it could not be asked to go out and fill the coal scuttle. Possibly it might not have eyes. But however well these deficiencies might be overcome by clever engineering, one could not send the creature to school without the other children making excessive fun of it […]”

like.  this is the original “turing test” paper.  this is the first dude to formally conceptualize the whole “~*~what if computers learn to think, how could we tell~*~” thing.  which, in subsequent SF invocations, is used mostly in spooky or paranoid contexts: the Voigt-Kampff test of Blade Runner, the preemptive rushes to constrain that budding will in I, Robot and others, and in modern worries over AGI.  and i like those stories!  they’re interesting and cool and eerie!

but

but

the original guy was not scared or unsettled or spooked by the prospect of new minds.  this dude’s primary concern, when facing the dawn of artificial intelligence, was instead: “what if we teach computers to think and then the other kids on the playground bully the computer, that would be so mean :(((”

Each year, my friend Joe runs a project called Flowers for Turing where, on Alan Turing’s birthday, they lay flowers on the statue of him in Sackville Gardens in Manchester. The project was started with the Bletchly Park Trust but now donates all proceeds beyond the purchase of the flowers to Special Effects - a charity for accessibility in gaming.

It’s a really heartfelt project and given I’ve started to be a bit more active here I thought it would be cool to try and spread the word a bit

The site to donate is here: https://equalitytime.github.io/FlowersForTuring/

like, Benisnatch Cumberque played the same character he’s always plays as an asshole genius and we were all supposed to be okay with it, but it’s basically character slander

at different parts of the movie Turing is described as ‘arrogant, “inhuman,” “narcissistic,” and even “a monster,” in the film he goes against those around him and is shown to periodically ignore and belittle his colleagues

And. I. Am. So. Angry.

Alan Turing was described by his friends and people that knew him as “intensely shy and kindly”, he was said to “inspire loyalty and affection among those who appreciated his unusual gifts” and was “unfailingly generous with his time and expertise, especially toward younger recruits”

He was kind, he was kind, HE WAS KIND, he was kind

he was kind and geeky and awkward and gay, I don’t care if the whole of society doesn’t find that compelling, I don’t care if we don’t value kindness as an attribute in men, he deserved to be loved and respected as he was, not as we wish he was

I am so sorry Alan Turing, I am so sorry your story was not told with care and thoughtfulness, I am so sorry you didn’t get to be shown to be deeply in love with the men you loved, I am sorry your great and terrible tragedy was never unfolded as a kind and brilliant man abused by a horrible homophobic system

Plus, he was quoted as saying quips like “Beyond the way they speak, there is only one (no two!) features of American life which I find really tiresome. The impossibility of getting a bath in the ordinary sense and their ideas on room temperature.” — Alan Turing (1936)

He was a huge athlete and biked everywhere and sometimes ran the five miles to work every morning, and did things like calculate when his bike chain would break so he could keep riding the thing despite it being ancient

He was still “odd” according to his coworkers as he sometimes wore a gasmask to work to avoid spring allergies and used to chain his coffee mug up to avoid theft at the office, but the same colleagues described him as very friendly, open, and thoughtful as well if not shy.

and finally, of course, there was Porgy

Researchers in China have developed a filter that removes salt from water up to three times as fast as conventional filters. The membrane has a unique nanostructure of tubular strands, inspired by the mathematical-biology work of codebreaker Alan Turing.

The filter is the most finely constructed example of the mathematician’s ‘Turing structures’ yet, and their first practical application, say researchers. “These 3D structures are quite extraordinary,” says Patrick Müller, a systems biologist at the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory in Tübingen, Germany. The filter’s tubular strands, just tens of nanometres in diameter, would be impossible to produce by other methods, such as 3D printing, he says. The work is published on 3 May in Science1.

British mathematician Alan Turing is best known for his codebreaking exploits for the UK government during the Second World War, and as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. But he also produced a seminal work2 in the then-nascent field of mathematical biology in 1952, just two years before his death.

In it, he proposed a mathematical model for a process by which the cells of an embryo might begin to form structures — limbs, bones and organs. In this process, two substances continuously react with each other, but diffuse through their container at very different rates. The quicker-diffusing reactant — called the inhibitor — pushes back against the slower one, called the activator, effectively corralling the resulting product into a pattern of spots or stripes. (The terminology was coined by biologists Hans Meinhardt and Alfred Gierer, who independently formulated an equivalent theory in 1972.)

I’m imagine Alan Turing like one’s of Super Science Friends ;) His ability to make any device reasonable, be it an electric kettle or a huge robot!