Alan Turing

"Lady Lovelace's Objection reminds us that machines can only do what we program them to do - or can they?"

"The idea that a machine cannot think because it is a machine is a curious prejudice."

"If a thing is physical, anything that it does can be simulated by a universal computing machine."

"Let us suppose we have found a way to keep the machine in mind when it attempts to imitate a man."

"The glory of mathematics is that we need not know what we are talking about in order to know that what we say is true."

"I am more interested in the questions we ask than in the answers we find."

"What is the most human thing about humans? Perhaps it is our ability to imagine things that don't exist."

"The presence or absence of a body is not the issue. It is the presence or absence of mind."

"We might say that a machine has behaved in an intelligent manner if it could sucessfully imitate a human."

"It is probably impossible to design a piece of machinery by which the Analytical Engine shall weave algebraical patterns of any degree of complexity."

"The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible."

"We need not always throw to the wolves the ideas which we use in mathematics."

"A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if we are to hope to build a complete description."

"Some of these digital computers are, I believe, the second machines ever made."

"I would say that we cannot really know where the boundary is between machine and human."

"In most of the cases of large machines, the labour cost is not the limiting factor."

"One can imagine various machines, and ask oneself which of them could the Analytical Engine simulated."

"The reader must accept it as a fact that digital computers can be constructed, and indeed have been constructed."

"The extent to which we regard something as behaving in an intelligently and emotionally fashion is determined by the interaction between the thing and ourselves."

"It is not normally possible to determine the state of a machine which is in a black box by any method other than seeing what comes out."

"Why not try to make a thinking machine and then see what it does?"

"The consequence of this argument is that we cannot know what a machine is thinking, only that it is thinking."

"Machinery is a wonderful thing, but we should always remember that it is a tool, not a master."

"To all intents and purposes, if a machine can behave like a human, is it not a human in some meaningful sense?"

"The mathematician does not work in the rigid lines of a soldier, but with the fluidity of thought itself."

"A digital computer can be made to do anything which we have sufficient ingenuity to describe in the form of directions."

"We can see that the answer to the question 'Can machines think?' is the same as the answer to 'Can men think?'"

"All this may seem a far cry from the hope of building a thinking machine, but it is the necessary foundation."

"If we consider the likelihood of machines replacing human beings, we must first understand what being human means."

"The paradox of machines is that the more human they become, the more we question what humanity means."