The AI delusion: why humans trump machines

As well as playing a key role in cracking the Enigma code at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and conceiving of the modern computer, the British mathematician Alan Turing owes his public reputation to the test he devised in 1950. Crudely speaking, it asks whether a human judge can distinguish between a human and an artificial intelligence based only on their responses to conversation or questions. This test, which he called the "imitation game," was popularised 15 years later in Philip K Dick's science-fiction novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? But Turing is also widely remembered as having committed suicide in 1954, quite probably driven to it by the hormone treatment he was instructed to take as an alternative to imprisonment for homosexuality (deemed to make him a security risk), and it is only comparatively recently that his genius has been afforded its full due. In 2009, Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the British government for his treatment; in 2014, his posthumous star rose further again when Benedict Cumberbatch played him in The Imitation Game; and in 2021, he will be the face on the new £50 note.