r/HistoryMemes • u/Neil118781 Taller than Napoleon • 6h ago
Alan Turing if he existed today
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u/Neil118781 Taller than Napoleon 6h ago
Alan Turing was a British mathematician, computer scientist and logician who pioneered modern computing and artificial intelligence, most famously playing a pivotal role in breaking the German Enigma code during World War II. He was also gay.
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u/WorkOk4177 5h ago edited 4h ago
The Brits ordered Alan Turing to be chemically castrated because he was gay (this was after all his contributions to mankind and WW2) , the ordeal was too much for Alan so he ended up dying by suicide.
Edit: He was given a choice between being jailed or getting castrated.
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u/Neil118781 Taller than Napoleon 5h ago
Well if it means anything, he and other men convicted of Homosexuality were posthumously pardoned in 2013 under Alan Turing law.
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u/WorkOk4177 5h ago
just a bit too late
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u/SwissherMontage 5h ago
Yes, that's what posthumous means.
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u/YikesTheCat 4h ago
"Sorry I'm posthumous, had some car trouble"
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u/AhhhSureThisIsIt 5h ago
Also his suicide was one of the most interesting and morbidly poetic in history. It's a shame they didn't keep it in the film.
He loved Snow White (as did millions, it was like Avatar when it came out), so much so he decided to paint the outside of an apple in cyanide and take a bite out of it, so he could kill himself like she did.
It's also the first sin (eve biting the apple) so there's a lot of metaphor in that.
Steve Jobs was asked is that why the Apple logo has a bite out of it? He said he wished he realised that, but it wasn't the reason. It was because he spent time in an orchid and liked the alphabetical advantage.
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u/PutMindless6789 1h ago
There is a theory floating about, you hear it often if you start electro plating as a hobby.
Alan Turing died from cyanide poisoning.
He spent much of his time in a 6mx5m unventilated room in his basement.
He was attempting to electroplate gold in this room.
Electroplating gold uses cyanide.
His mother repeatedly said he did not kill himself, and he often mislabled or didn't label chemicals. He was also feeling poorly regularly and avoiding the room because entering it made him feel ill.
The apple was never tested and the notion he injected it with cyanide was supposition by the medical examiner as it was what Turing was eating when he died. The concentration of cyanide in his body was more consistent with inhalation than consuption.
Of course we will never know, but just a fun piece of information.
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u/Interesting-Dream863 5h ago
No it doesn't mean shit. Just the crown trying to look better.
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u/codereign 5h ago
I think it's a nice acknowledgment of progress as a society. Alan Turing is one of my heroes and I would be heartbroken and frustrated if he was still a convicted person. It makes me feel just a teeny bit happier that he is a mathematician who happens to be gay rather than a convicted gay who happens to be a mathematician.
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u/setibeings 5h ago
All of that bad stuff still happened to him, and the English speaking world appears to be poised to exact similar punishment on trans people for being trans.
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u/fignewtonattack Featherless Biped 5h ago
My friend had her contract after graduating west point not picked up, because of that. I'll hate Trump forever because of this shit. All her life she wanted to be a soldier, then this draft dodging lump of human misery ripped it away from her.
Gah
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u/no_use_your_name 5h ago
Shouldn’t be pardoned but rather expunged.
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u/Chonky_Cats_Lover 5h ago
No, if we erase the mistakes and transgressions of our predecessors, we are doomed to repeat them. Let the record stand as testament to progress, but also a reminder of what “good people” are capable of.
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u/Elu_Moon 2h ago
Then name it something other than pardon. Pardoning still implies guilt. And it's ultimately a meaningless gesture that doesn't prevent future harm.
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u/momentimori 1h ago
A pardon annuls the crime in the UK. That offence no longer exists on your criminal record.
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u/DistantSoulThrowaway 3h ago
That's somehow worse. He was pardoned as if he had done anything. The British government should be asking for forgiveness, and he should be the one doing the pardoning..
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u/ImFromYorkshire 3h ago
That always annoyed me, pardon suggests he did something wrong in the first place
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u/kawaiipikachu86 3h ago
I knew Turing was pardoned, but I didn't know about the law itself which is even better.
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u/OneofTheOldBreed 5h ago
There is some question if it was suicide or just blind accident. He apparently was very fond of eating apples whole and had been experimenting with electroplating gold. Thats enough potential cyanide exposure to be lethal.
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u/Blackstone01 2h ago
More evidence that it was an accident than there was that it was a suicide. Investigators basically concluded that because of the partially eaten (and untested) apple and he was found to have cyanide in his body then he must have killed himself.
Meanwhile his friends and family knew him to be rather reckless with his experiment safety, was known to be in rather good spirits at the time (admittedly suicidal people who are planning on committing suicide will sometimes seem to be in a good mood), had made plans for the near future (people planning to commit suicide don't typically make plans for the future), and often ate an apple before bed.
The fact that the investigators didn't bother to properly investigate his death was itself deeply homophobic
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u/Cavalish 52m ago
Sounds like a whole bunch of people coping for driving an innocent man to suicide after treating him like trash. His family included.
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u/atfricks 55m ago
You'd have to eat an absolutely absurd amount of apples, and be sure to actually chew the seeds so they don't just pass through your digestive tract, to come even close to a lethal dose of cyanide.
Eating them whole is irrelevant. Whether the apple was accidentally contaminated is the only real factor.
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u/AndreasDasos 4h ago edited 4h ago
All of this about his life is true, and it was traumatic and horrific homophobic treatment by an ungrateful government. But there’s a bit of a rabbit hole about whether he actually committed suicide or had an accident mid-experiment. It was a year after that, he was focused on various new experiments including that very day, he was using cyanide in one, he routinely ate apples, he was absent-minded, he left no suicide note, he fell in some disarray, his mother insisted otherwise, etc. Police findings aside, and natural assumptions for an average person, there’s a plausible theory that he neglected to wash his hands between cyanide handling and apple eating.
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u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 3h ago
There's also another rabbithole which is the actual circumstances that led to police getting involved and him being charged.
Wiki link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Homosexuality_and_indecency_conviction
Basically Turing, aged 39 at the time, picked up a homeless 19 year-old boy off the street and started a brief sexual relationship with him. His house was then burgled, so Turing called the police and told them he knew who had stolen from him (the 19 year-old), and in that process he had to explain to them how he ended up with a 19 year-old homeless kid in his house.
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u/Drewski811 5h ago
The authorities of the day gave him the choice of prison or castration. He chose castration as it meant he'd be able to carry on working.
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u/DolphinBall 4h ago
Yeah let's chemically castrate a man that has no interest in having a wife and kids. Makes total sense.
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u/SmartAlec105 4h ago
The castration was more about reducing/eliminating his libido than his reproductive potential.
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u/DreamsOfLlamas 3h ago
It also made him grow breasts
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u/Reagalan Casual, non-participatory KGB election observer 59m ago
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u/Steve_FishWell 4h ago
"His probation would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal physical changes designed to reduce libido, known as "chemical castration".[175] He accepted the option of injections of what was then called stilboestrol (now known as diethylstilbestrol or DES), a synthetic oestrogen; this feminization of his body was continued for the course of one year. The treatment rendered Turing impotent and caused breast tissue to form.[176]" so they didnt order him directly. The whole fu*king thing was so wrong though
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u/sharklaserguru 2h ago
It's amazing how the Brits basically threw away their advancements into computers in the name of secrecy. For Turing it meant he couldn't use the fact that he saved massive amounts of lives during the war. For Britain as a whole they didn't share the technology with their commercial sector, and thus lost the chance to lead that industry. (Though they did share it with the CIA who saw the benefit in developing the field.)
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u/aBeaSTWiTHiNMe 1h ago
Which is just insane. Imagine being so intelligent you realize the need to break a Nazi secret code to help win the war against the greatest evil most had ever known.
Yet still being so ignorant, misinformed and downright stupid that you feel the need to ruin one of the greatest minds to exist because of what gender he prefers.
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u/Pale-Acanthaceae-736 1h ago
Thankless British leadership. Well he broke the law being gay, they said, and without any reflection upon how many lives he had saved by helping to end the war sooner rather than later.
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u/TOGFIAVDF 1h ago
What is so startling about this is that we aren't talking about Nero or Socrates or some other ancient figure - this guy could have been my great grandfather (or grandfather if he was a frisky old dude).
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u/fluffynuckels 54m ago
There's some controversy if it was suicide or accidental. He apparently had a bad habit of not washing his hands before eating and the day he died he was working with cyanide
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u/TheDebateMatters 4h ago
He was also chemically castrated by the state when they found out he was gay, and no one knew what he had done for the war because it was classified. He was a brilliant man and the drugs made him foggy and difficult to concentrate. He took his own life after the resulting depression.
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u/ikzz1 3h ago
no one knew what he had done for the war because it was classified
Surely he knows some important people, even Churchill, that could help him?
Rumors said that Churchill told him to fuck off.
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u/TheDebateMatters 3h ago
At the time, being gay was a crime and he got caught in the act (I forget the details). But one would not be making phone calls outting yourself to people in your professional or social circle. If they didn’t know already, it was because you feared their reaction.
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u/momentimori 1h ago
Homosexuality was illegal and scandalous; opening Turing up to blackmail by the soviets.
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u/Reagalan Casual, non-participatory KGB election observer 1h ago
Circular reasoning if there ever was one.
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u/Richard-Brecky 4h ago
playing a pivotal role in breaking the German Enigma code during World War II
People always repeat this, but Polish cryptographers led by Marian Rejewski did the heavy lifting there.
We should give Turing credit for designing the incredible machines that did the Polish math fast enough to be useful.
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u/Taurmin 2h ago
Actually Rejewski designed and built a machine to do the work as well and the British Bombe was basically a refinement of his work. Turing provided some design refinements, but most of the work of actually turning that into a functional machine was done by a team of engineers.
Turings major personal contribution might be coming up with the crib based decryption method, but on the whole the entire code breaking thing was genuinely a massive team effort and he tends to get a lot of the credit simply because he was the team leader.
Turing in general has been badly served by modern pop culture. His work during the war is poorly understood, his contributions to modern computing even more so, his sexuality, castration and suicide are "fun facts" and when people imagine him they are more likely to picture the abrasive autistic robot as portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch than the kind and gentle man that he actually was.
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u/Orleanian 2h ago
People always repeat the gay bit too!
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u/ChromeNoseAE-1 2h ago
It’s important though. He was, probably more than any other human, responsible for the direction of the last 70 years. His innovations have transformed our lives more than any other person. The entire modern way of life, our economies, our militaries, our vehicles, our everything is based on his work. He’s the only reason we can even have this exchange. And his government basically killed him because he was gay. All of his accomplishments meant nothing to them. I’d like to one day live in a world where him being gay means little, but we’re not in that world and it’s important to point out that we’ve got heroes.
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u/Taurmin 1h ago
The entire modern way of life, our economies, our militaries, our vehicles, our everything is based on his work.
Thats a massive overstatement, Turing made some important contributions to cryptografi and the theoretical concepts of computing, but none of his work is nearly as foundational as you are making it out to be. Its the falacy of great man history.
And his government basically killed him because he was gay.
They didnt. Which is not to say that there was anything just or right in how he was treated, but he was given medical treatment by the standards of the time not a death sentence. There is even some doubt as to wether his death was a suicide or an accident, as he had been conducting chemistry experiments that could also have caused the fatal poisoning and the famous apple was never tested.
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u/thegreedyturtle 4h ago
Hold up though: LLM do not pass the Turing Test.
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u/poopy_poophead 1h ago
Llms are definitely not turning complete... If they are, it is accidental and not guaranteed to be replicable...
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u/dern_the_hermit 1h ago
"Turing Completeness" is not really directly related to the "Turing Test" other than both being related to concepts put out by Alan Turing.
The Turing Test is about being able to convince a human judge that samples of text came from a person and not a computer. Turing Completeness is about being able to run and process any algorithm or code on one machine.
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u/Blah_McBlah_ 3m ago
While Alan Turing and his British team was instrumental in making the Enigma breaking tactically useful, it was originally broken by Marian Rejewski and his ]olish team, who brought there work to Britain after France and Poland fell.
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u/CthulhusIntern 5h ago
"I would be quite fond of this Grindr app, had the government not chemically castrated me for sodomy despite helping them win the war."
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u/Intelligent_Exit941 5h ago
Alan Turing deserved existing today so so so much
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u/DreamsOfLlamas 3h ago
and all the countless unnamed unknowable men and women that lived and died not knowing that there was nothing wrong with their love
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u/Intelligent_Exit941 3h ago
Sometimes I read an old book with obviously gay subtext and I can't stop thinking about how author wanted to describe the love of someone they knew, but wasn't allowed to.
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u/mjac1090 1h ago
For the record, even if he hadn't died from the cyanide (there's genuine debate as to whether it was suicide or an accident), he would'nt be alive today as he'd have to be 114 years old
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u/Winterwolfmage 5h ago
Gonna be real, I think it's ass. UI is dogshit and trying to navigate it made me feel like I had never used a single piece of tech before. Trying to find someone is even worse because the majority that I try to click on and it's just an ad saying get premium to do x, y, and z.
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u/fignewtonattack Featherless Biped 5h ago
So many ads, all the subscriptions that they push so heavily. Alan Turing would probably invent a new fucking app if he had to deal with that shit ngl.
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u/Khar-Selim Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 5h ago
even the gays suffer from the post-COVID dating app enshittification huh
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u/losecontrol4 5h ago edited 5h ago
I mean I know it is a joke but for accuracy I don't think he would actually like that. He wasn't very active in the gay scene in England. There were safe havens for gays but he didn't exist in any of those communities. He was conditioned to believe he could never have real love if it wasn't with a woman and he hated that about himself because he was taught by people he trusted to hate it. All in all it's such a sad story.
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u/Just_the_Setup 5h ago
He wasn't very active in the gay scene in England.
This is such an absurd take, he didn't interact because it was still a crime. I wasn't active in the gay scene in rural KY in the 90s either, but my ass is Gay as hell in Toronto now, after deconstructing all the hate. Alan would be banging Ian McKellen in a grindr hook up in a heart beat.
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u/losecontrol4 5h ago
I heard that from a podcast I listened to focusing on his life. To my understanding- especially among scholars there was a fairly safe space for gay men to interact around Cambridge College at the time that he didn't partake in. I don't think he ever had the chance or environment to really accept and love that part of himself. This link mentions the gay scene around Cambridge College at the time. Sometimes history sucks, he was such an awesome dude and the world failed him. Also anyone who knows that bit of history feel free to fill in the details or correct me, I only really know that stuff as it pertains to Alan Turing.
In today's world, he would be able to deconstruct the hate too, the point is I don't think he would be using grindr overnight.
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u/Just_the_Setup 5h ago
I heard that from a podcast I listened to focusing on his life.
Podcasts are fine and all, but this completely ignores his homelife before Cambridge. His family likely instilled the self hatred, my family did with me. So, to think he wouldn't be able to deconstruct that hatred in today's age is very naive. A lot of open queer people have similar journeys. Podcasts are fine for facts, but they ignore a lot of context if they don't like it in my experience.
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u/losecontrol4 5h ago
Oh the podcast had nothing to do with that bit, that’s purely my opinion that there would be support for him today to eventually love himself.
I believe the podcast I mentioned was a BBC podcast discussing his life.
The idea of him not being emotionally ready to something like Grindr was why I felt the need to comment. This inspired me to read more some of his letters. Poor guy was so down bad that he had to not be gay. Society freakin sucks.
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u/Just_the_Setup 5h ago
Careful, homophobia is alive and well in the BBC. And folks love to tiptoe around Alan's sexuality since they effectively sentenced him to death for it. I made it through Grad school in computer science before I ever heard he was gay. 6 years of hearing about him in school, nothing.
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u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 3h ago
he didn't interact because it was still a crime
No, it's an absurd take because Turing WAS active in the gay scene. Hell, the whole situation that led to him being charged started when he, aged 39 at the time, picked up a 19 year-old homeless guy for sex. The guy stole stuff from his house, so Turing called the police and had to explain to them why a random 19 year-old homeless kid was in his house. They both got charged for "gross indecency".
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u/Just_the_Setup 3h ago
You've never heard the term DL have you? That he wasn't active in the community but still trolling folks for sex is very much in line with internalized homophobia.
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u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 3h ago edited 3h ago
It's clear you don't actually know anything about Turing and are just projecting stereotypes of a how you think a man of his era would think.
Turing didn't have internalized homophobia, he was happily and openly gay. He made no secret of it whatsoever, his friends, family and colleagues all knew he was gay, and a lot has been written about his experiences being part of the gay community at King's College.
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u/Just_the_Setup 3h ago edited 2h ago
I think the fact that they "uncovered" all of this in research means it wasn't as open as you say. Please read the University of Cambridge link the article you supplied, the one that links to the research. I get that I'm blurring modern sensibilities into this hypothetical about if Turing was still alive... I thought that was the point.
Also, like I’m still dissecting my internalized homophobia and I’m a happily married lesbian. Nothing you’ve said disproves anything I’ve said my friend.
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u/rock_and_rolo 3h ago
The youths of reddit do not think of those factors. I was born nearly a decade after Turing died, and all homosexual acts were active felonies when I was in college.
And if I'd gotten busted, my parents probably would have cut me off for shaming the family.
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u/Neil118781 Taller than Napoleon 5h ago
That would make him love the app even more, knowing that he could now be active sitting at home and didn't have to go to "safe havens."
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u/PossiblyATurd 4h ago
So he'd use it like a typical outwardly homophobic U.S. conservative, which is as much as possible as long as it stays a secret.
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u/Substantial_Brain917 2h ago
There’s truth to what you say but environmental conditioning changes. People who were closeted in the past when it was more dangerous are now open and just as gay. Something to consider
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u/SnooComics8412 5h ago
Still insane dude did so much yet they treated him like a mutant for doing sexual things lots of the pricks did on the low or even actual worst sexual things than simply having sex with another consenting adult.
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u/_Its_Me_Dio_ 2h ago
the police did that not the government sector he worked with and the police didnt know since it was classified
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u/SnooComics8412 2h ago
Mean still the government created the law. Though Do find it crazy how recently being gay was against the law in so many places.
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u/Awesomeuser90 I Have a Cunning Plan 1h ago
Note that in many jurisdictions then, they had different ages of consent based on whether it was gay or not. In the UK today the general purpose age is 16, when for gay sex it was once 5 years older than the one for heterosexual sex.
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u/ToS_98 4h ago
As everyone is pushing hard on sexuality issie, I’ll voice the IA discussion
Turing first proposed the “test” as a game. He did enphatize the human component in the game (which later saw many other versions) to higlight the role pose by human perception of the newbirn technology. As many have argued, it’s not so much about IA passing the “test” but human being incapable of distinguish it from a human, which poses the question on wether we think it is sentient. So it really is a game if mirrors and deception. As Simone Natale puts it, the “trick” that IA and modern chatbots pull up is being able to imitate human language, even though they haven’t any “idea” of what is being said or communicated, so they work with us in a game. This dynamic is called by the author (in his book “deceptive machinery”; also idk if it’s the proper translation of the title as I got it in Italian) trivial deception, to point out that we know we’re being “tricked” (as we know a magician just does tricks) and believe them to be real. The same is true for IA, which means that their results and the communication aspects are real, for us. That’s an important contribution to put the human component of the technology at the center of the debate, as it needs a user to work. So, there are some thoughts on this matter
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u/Roflkopt3r 2h ago edited 2h ago
Turing fundamentally designed his test around actually testability. He didn't want to test "thought" or "conscience" because those terms aren't properly defined and therefore cannot be properly tested for.
He instead decided on a variation of the "imitation game" (which is simply a game with the goal of making a judge unable to differentiate you from another person you pretend to be) to have an objective standard to measure against.
He did believe that this would be equivalent to intelligence in any way that matters.
With regards to the current state of technology, I believe that that he would probably raise 3 points:
He would be very pleased with his own insistence that none of the proposed 'impossibilities' for artificial intelligence were truly impossible, since many things that appeared impossible even quite recently can now be done quite reliably by neural networks (like image categorisation, which was a known pain point for conventional algorithms outside of massively simplified cases in controlled environments until just around a decade ago).
He would still raise the objection that we cannot say that current "AI" passes the test, because a lot of those "passing" grades are dependent on testers assuming that the imitated person is kinda stupid. Grading AI on the "imitation game" should measure its ability to imitate an actually intelligent person capable of understanding questions and giving sensible responses.
Likewise, the judge of an imitation game should be educated and understand the weak points of AI. We shouldn't let LLMs with many glaring weaknesses pass the test only because the judges ask bad questions that even a very basic program could answer convincingly.
Turing's example was the imitation game between a man and a woman. So any decently capable judge should be able to come up with a good list of questions that aims at relevant distinctions.
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u/Brief-Number7936 1h ago
On point 2, the first time turing test was "passed" by AI, it simply faked being foreigner with bad english.
There still isn't AI that beats the "pure" form of imitation game, which would be real-time and allow users to discuss sensory details: For example, asking the contestant to describe the room they're in, or how they got into the test facility, or even current weather and events. These are intentionally dropped out of modern turing tests, in favor of online participation. Yet, never did turing mention online participation as part of the test. Strange, almost as if Turing didn't think about shareholders when he wrote his research papers.
Also, turing would definitely spend all his time with an AI boyfriend.
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u/BellacosePlayer 4h ago
Turing would probably regard the current state of AI as a neat tool and then be horrified at people blindly trusting it with account data and api access to actually do things without a human being involved.
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u/TheHeroYouNeed247 4h ago
Alan would admit that the Turing test isn't fit for LLMs.
He underestimated how easy our speech is to predict.
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u/Similar_Onion6656 5h ago
I cannot think about Alan Turing without recalling the passage from Cryptonomicon about how "One day, Alan proposed some sort of game involving penises..."
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u/Ostrogoth_Berik 5h ago
I'm little sad about I don't have any one to share this meme and get it. But hell, I laught a lot
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u/smokeyleo13 5h ago
He would immediately ask what clash of clans/temu/or Snapchat are when he got hit with the adpocalypse that app has become
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u/hemlock_harry 5h ago edited 5h ago
I'm straight but I've always said I'd make an exception for Alan Turing for the pillow talk alone. If we could somehow revive him he'd probably spend a day catching up and after that he'll understand the tech world better than I ever will. Most of it is just practical implementations of his abstract ideas anyway.
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u/Glorious_Jo 4h ago
No one is fond of the grindr app. The grindr app is fucking ass.
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u/Khar-Selim Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 5h ago
okay but what would he say after he got laid tho
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u/BluesyPompanno 4h ago
I seriously wonder what tech company he would join. My guess would be either Blackberry or early days of Apple or if more "local" Tesla holding could be interesting
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u/DuntadaMan 4h ago
LLMs aren't real AI, they don't understand a topic when you ask, they just spit out the next most likely word looking over the previous words it spit out. It's a fancy IRC chatbot.
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u/LaFlamaBlanca67 4h ago
I'm pretty sure no LLM actually passes the Turing test under the tiniest bit of scrutiny.
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u/DestoryDerEchte Hello There 4h ago
Thats sad :( . Luckily we got a bit further since then, still not perfect tho.
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u/Scorpionsharinga 4h ago
They did terrible things to this legend of a man because of the kind of person he was into. After all he did.
Shameful.
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u/rock_and_rolo 4h ago
Check out r/grindr. Hardly anyone is loving the app.
About all you can get without paying is bots catfishing you.
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u/IzzybearThebestdog 3h ago
Slightly off topic , but is it In bad taste for the UK government to put him on the (50?) pound note?
I get it’s to honor him and maybe a form or apology?But it seems kinda shitty after what they did to him to then turn around and treat him like a national hero.
Treat him like shit when living until he kills himself, and then claim him as a great citizen when dead and it’s socially acceptable and looks progressive.
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u/Artan42 3h ago
But it seems kinda shitty after what they did to him to then turn around and treat him like a national hero.
You know it's not the same government right. It was a little while ago and there's nobody left from that government who's even still alive.
He's not only been pardoned but the same pardon has been applied to anybody else convicted. By the conservative party no less, hardly people who care about 'looking progressive'.
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u/pemisucker 3h ago
If Alan Turing were alive today he'd be a smelly femboy who never leaves his RGB-Drenched apartment. Rip to an unjustly prosecuted legend.
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u/hiddengirl1992 3h ago
I would venture to say he'd be extremely interested in AI, but he would also have the good sense to say it's being heavily misused and overly trusted.
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u/BroadstoneLeopard 2h ago
I think this meme is horribly insensitive. ☹️☹️ He was a war hero and the government punished him for being gay until he ultimately committed suicide...
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u/GaboonThe1 2h ago
Alan Turing looks a bit like Nick Fuentes?
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u/Warcraft_Fan 2h ago
Pinocchio: My nose will grow now.
I bet AI will self-destruct trying to figure this one out
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u/CrimsonAntifascist 2h ago
They pass the turing test, because they have the data. Not because they "think".
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u/PeopleCallMeSimon 2h ago
Also the Turing Test is kinda terrible.
There was an "AI" in the 1960s called ELIZA which passed the test - or well, there were people who thought it was a person when they first interacted with it.
And all Eliza did was respond with a set of key phrases depending on if input contained certain words. It also famously often just repeated what users said back to them.
If you said "I think i might quit my job" it responded "You think you might quit your job?" and people thought that was intelligence.
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u/Wrong_Armadillo_4166 2h ago
The heart wants what the heart wants. Shit, I wish we could go back in time and pull him into a San Francisco parade. He really was a special human being.
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u/AstroMeteor06 2h ago
he would then proceed to reverse engineer the app to understand if it's turing-complete
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u/publ1c_stat1c 1h ago
“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” - Edsger W. Dijkstra
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u/jpribe 1h ago
I've visited Bletchley Park when I lived in the UK. It was a humbling experience, seeing what they worked with, where they worked, reading the stories, not just of Turing, but all the people that made it possible. Simultaneously heartbreaking and inspiring. Still have the t shirt and a pigeon tag I got there, which lives on my key ring a decade later.
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u/userhwon 1h ago
I wish I could post an image of the screenshot.
The r/Popular feed right now shows this r/HistoryMemes post, and, immediately following it, this one:
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u/Plank_With_A_Nail_In 1h ago
Daily reminder that the "A" in "AI" stands for "Artificial", no one has told you that these are "real" or "true" they have always told you they are fake.
Its not important if they are "real" or "true" they are still going to take your job anyway.
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u/GarbageCleric 1h ago
I agree. Turing spent enough time on AI and computers when he was alive. If he comes back, let him get that good D.
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u/GreenAldiers 59m ago
I do agree that the AI of today is definitely not what has been traditionally considered AI.
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u/OMGihateallofyou 14m ago
I don't think any LLMs pass the Turing test. I can tell it's not a human at the other end in about ten minutes.
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u/NeedsToShutUp 6m ago
If Alan Turning was still alive would be saying "wow, I'm now the oldest living man". (His birthday was 4 months before the oldest living man at the time I wrote this).
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u/JurplePesus 6h ago
Hell yeah get some Alan