“I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set”; or, I think: Turing-ish
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Personal SubStack
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/10/17
Digital computers,
Mechanical brains.
A mere newspaper stunt?
Machines are not brains?
You and I know that they are.
It is not altogether unreasonable to describe digital computers as brains.
The man in the street.
‘The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.’
Agree with Lady Lovelace’s dictum.
‘If any machine can appropriately be
described as a brain, then any digital computer can be so described.’
A digital computer is a universal machine.
More complicated machines,
more complicated brains,
larger and larger computers.
The wisest description of digital computers as
‘mechanical brains’
or
‘electronic brains’:
we do not at present know how this should be done.
Inclined to believe
that such a programme will be found.
To behave like a brain
seems to involve free will.
The behaviour of a digital computer
is completely determined.
It may be that the feeling of free will
is an illusion.
One does not need to understand
these orders,
any more than one needs to understand
the mechanism of germination.
The plant comes up
whether one understands or not.
When the problem has been solved,
only the essential facts
need to be told to the jury.
If a machine can think,
it might think more intelligently
than we do.
We should feel greatly humbled.
This new danger
is much closer.
It is not astronomically remote.
“It is customary, in a talk or article on this subject, to offer a grain of comfort, in the form of a statement that some particularly human characteristic could never be imitated by a machine… I cannot offer any such comfort, for I believe that no such bounds can be set… Attempts to produce a thinking machine seem to me to be in a different category. The whole thinking process is still rather mysterious to me, but I believe that the attempt to make a thinking machine will help us greatly in finding out how we think ourselves.”
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