To steal the fire of the gods: Alan Turing (1912-1954), Modern Prometheus
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51359/2357-9986.2022.254744Keywords:
Alan Turing, Portraits of Prometheus, mechanicism, machine intelligence, dystopia, luddismAbstract
Turing is often identified as founder of modern computer science, cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence. Less than a hundred years after his (1936) and (1950) papers, the world is at the edge of consolidating the process of mediating experience through digitial artifices. Given Turing's foundational role, it is worth asking about his ambition. I will emphasize one of the key influences on Turing: the utopian or dystopian novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler, the core of which appeared in 1863 as “Darwin among the machines” and proposed, in the wake of the industrial revolution, to consider the possibility of the “mechanical kingdom” to subvert the supremacy of the human species. My studies suggest the association of Turing with the modern tradition of mechanical explanations of the status of human. Turing, as a philosopher of nature, however, was a complex thinker. Once publicly confronted by conservatives, he manifested in irony and wit the face that would make a contemporary to characterize him as a “scientific Shelley”, in reference to to the English romantic and poet author of Prometheus unbound. Turing, following Butler, understood machines as a species of their own which had the potential to enlighten the human species, perhaps with great difficulties to us.References
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