Why We Should Remember Alan Turing As A Philosopher - AI Summary

But in June 1945, just weeks after Germany had surrendered, Turing was hired by the UK's National Physical Laboratory to lead the development of an electronic version of his universal computing machine. I have spent a considerable time in this lecture on this question of memory, because I believe that the provision of proper storage is the key to the problem of the digital computer, and certainly if they are to be persuaded to show any sort of genuine intelligence. The philosopher Jack Copeland, director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing in New Zealand, has described this paper as the first manifesto of AI, and that seems accurate as far as our present historical knowledge goes. For example, there survive minutes from an October 1949 philosophy seminar discussion between Turing, Newman, the neurosurgeon Geoffrey Jefferson and Michael Polanyi, who was then professor of social science at Manchester, on'the mind and the computing machine'. The first is a brief lecture entitled'Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory', probably first broadcast in 1951, in which his stated objective is to question the commonly held belief'You cannot make a machine to think for you' by explaining, and reflecting on, the technique of reinforcement learning.