Update, 22 July 2014: On 24 December 2013, Alan Turing was following a request from justice secretary Chris Grayling
Original article, 26 July 2013
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What do we do with the knowledge that people not all that different from ourselves have behaved with astounding stupidity and cruelty, over and over again, in the recent past? Become paranoid of ourselves?
This is the kind of question that haunts me when I think of Alan Turing. For those who don鈥檛 know, Turing was the most essential mathematician leading to the invention of computers and the birth of my discipline, computer science. I couldn鈥檛 owe him more. He was also one of the greatest war heroes we have known, for he applied computer science in its birthing hour to break Enigma, a notorious Nazi code, and is generally thought to have shortened the course of the second world war by perhaps two years. He might have saved millions of lives, even nations.
We鈥檙e not done. In the years before his death in 1954, Turing made a huge contribution to philosophy and culture by articulating the underpinnings of artificial intelligence, including what has come to be known as the famous 鈥淭uring test鈥� thought experiment. And yet he did that with a degree of sophistication 鈥� including a dose of salutary self-doubt 鈥� that derivative AI enthusiasts rarely achieve.
Illegal state of being
If only this wonderful roster could suffice as a summary of a great life. Alas, we must also remember how Turing died. He was gay at a time when that was an illegal state of being. He was prosecuted after the war and subjected to 鈥渃hemical castration鈥�. He apparently killed himself, eating an apple laced with cyanide, at age 41. We will never know what further gifts he could have given.
Now, after decades of murmurs and false starts, it appears the . How can we think about this?
It isn鈥檛 easy. Of course the prosecution of Turing was an abomination. But as present-day observers, are we stroking ourselves on the back a little too readily by suggesting we now have the perspicuity from which to declare a pardon to this one brilliant man? What about the almost 50,000 other men in the UK convicted in the same way? Do you have to be one of the highest-performing people of the century to merit a pardon under an immoral law that has been repudiated?
The very idea of a pardon suggests that the government speaks from a moral high ground and that the prosecution might have been inadvertently based on false evidence or some other bloodless mistake. There is a degree of implicit misrepresentation, though it is never easy for a government to own up to its own failings. (It took about a century and a half after the official end of slavery in the US for the government to finally state an apology, which was intoned by President Bill Clinton.)
Confused message
The notion of pardon sends a confused message. Shouldn鈥檛 there be an apology to all those convicted, directed to their memory and their descendants? I am not a British citizen, but as a computer scientist, I think I have some small standing to voice a complaint.
I have always wanted to get more of a sense of Turing, the person. The historian George Dyson has done wonderful work bringing the earliest chapters of computer science to light; are a fine place to start. But I got a glimpse of the man earlier this year, when I was speaking in Victoria, Canada, about the gratitude all of us in computer science feel toward Turing.
Afterwards, an elderly woman named Olive Bailey was introduced to me. She was lovely, formal and yet quite emotional, for you see, she was one of the last remaining members of the codebreaking team that worked with Turing at . (During the war years and for some time thereafter, a window of opportunity opened for technically gifted women. This pattern wasn鈥檛 unique to Britain. In the US, when the brightest male techies were corralled into industrial-scale high-tech projects like nuclear weapons or long-range missiles, women were often recruited to work in the still-new field of software. Grace Hopper, for instance, led a mostly female team to develop the first code compiler.)
Nerdy yet colourful
One thing Olive told me was that Turing was not a person who revealed a great deal of himself in the lab, but he did set the tone for how to do computer science, and she feels that tone living on through computer researchers today, even if it鈥檚 not clear how to articulate exactly what it entails. Turing was both a prototype of the 鈥渘erdy鈥� personality we associate with digital technology today, and a romantic, daring, colourful soul.
In pure mathematics, it is commonly recognised that while the maths itself is abstract, the way we understand it is cultural, and therefore it is relevant to know the human stories behind mathematical advances. We benefit from knowing about , for instance, because it informs our appreciation of his rambling accomplishments. Understanding a little about him helps us enter into his mindset and trace his steps.
But computer science has taken on a somewhat less humanistic sensibility. This is unfortunate. I have seen the Turing test taught many times, in philosophy or computer science departments, and the circumstances of Turing鈥檚 life at the time are rarely brought into the narrative.
The test, , was Turing鈥檚 thought experiment in which he asks whether we would, so to speak, deny personhood to a computer that could fool us into thinking it was a person in the course of a conversation. But Turing wrote of this idea during a troubled period of his life, just as he himself was being denied personhood. Furthermore, he was being persecuted by a government that he had helped triumph over fascism, the ideology most based on denying the humanity of others.
Pure mind
Might Turing鈥檚 notion of the test have been an indictment of how we judge each other鈥檚 humanity? Might it have been a comforting fantasy, an escape into an abstract form of existence where no one is gay or straight, but only pure mind? Turing didn鈥檛 live long enough to say all he probably would have about his thinking. In a footnote he speculates that even if a computer became a 鈥減erson鈥� according to empirical criteria, both it and a natural human would still derive personhood from a source beyond physics, from the divine.
Whatever the test meant to Turing in his final days, I don鈥檛 detect hatred, vengeance or really any outward aggression in his voice. This is remarkable. I can hardly imagine being in similar circumstances without lashing out at my persecutors. This is Turing鈥檚 legacy, and any pardon coming so late in the game is nothing but dust and posturing in comparison.
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