Alan Turing and the Machines That Imitate Us

19/08/2025 9 min Temporada 1 Episodio 6

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Episode Synopsis

He cracked the Nazi Enigma code—and may have shortened World War II by two years. He helped invent the modern computer—before the term even existed. He asked a question no one had dared to ask: “Can machines think?” And then set out to answer it.His name was Alan Turing. A Cambridge mathematician turned wartime cryptanalyst, Turing worked in secret at Bletchley Park, leading the effort to break Germany’s unbreakable code. After WWII he turned his mind to the next frontier: intelligent machines and proposed the Imitation Game—what we now call the Turing Test—as a way to measure whether a machine could convincingly mimic human conversation.We brought Alan Turing to 2025 to ask what he thinks of his legacy. We may not be happy with his response.More information: They Tried to Warn Us, the book: More info on each podcast interview subject, along with 15 more interviews.They Tried to Warn Us, the newsletter: Follow the action on Ray's Substack.