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The Question

  1. 01The Question
  2. 02The machines arrive
  3. 03The uncomfortable question
  4. 04A peculiar habit of mind
  5. 05What Turing had already built
  6. 06Unsatisfied
  7. 07What does it mean to think?
  8. 08The definition problem
  9. 09The Imitation Game
  10. 10Why this sidesteps the problem
  11. 11Why this was radical
  12. 12Meet ELIZA
  13. 13What did you notice?
  14. 14The question is still open
  15. 15Reinforce your understanding
  16. 16Question: Turing's move
  17. 17Question: Behavior
  18. 18Question: Limits of the test
  19. 19Quiz: answer
  20. 20The question follows you
  21. 21Want to go deeper?
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A peculiar habit of mind

One person picked it up.

Alan Turing was a mathematician. But his real gift was something rarer: he took uncomfortable questions seriously.

Most people looked at “Can machines think?” and moved on. Too vague. Too philosophical. The kind of question that sounds deep but leads nowhere.

Turing did not move on. He stayed with it, turned it over, looked for the part he could actually work with. That habit of refusing to abandon a question just because it was hard is what made him the right person to ask it.

Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. academic.oup.com
  2. 2. plato.stanford.edu
Citations(2)↓
  1. 1. academic.oup.com
  2. 2. plato.stanford.edu