Alan Turing, mathematician: “At some stage therefore, we should have to expect the machines to take control”

Computing power has come a long way since mathematician Alan Turing broke the Nazi’s Enigma machine code. Even so, the Father of AI saw what the possibilities were way back in 1951 when he gave a lecture in Manchester, England, titled ‘Intelligent Machinery, A Heretical Theory’.

During his lecture he explored how one could go about “educating” a machine and that were this possible, no matter how hard we tried to keep up, they would soon “outstrip our feeble powers” of intelligence. However, he also talked of the consequences of successfully building such machines, and his prediction seems all too possible today.

The rise of the machines

Humans have already begun handing over mundane tasks to AI. But as they rapidly advance in ability, they hold the promise to take on ever more complex tasks. IBM predicts that within the next ten years the fledgling field of multimodal AI, which “more closely resembles how humans communicate by understanding data across visuals, voice, facial expressions and vocal inflections,” will be validated and fine-tuned.

There is also the possibility, although very speculative, that Artificial General Intelligence system could emerge. “We might see the dawn of AI systems that can autonomously generate, curate and refine their own training datasets, enabling self-improvement and adaptation without human intervention,” notes the company’s report on the future of AI.

Even though machines aren’t made of living materials, yet, Turing said that “there would be no question of the machines dying.” But like humans, the visionary also foresaw that “they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits.”

“At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control,” Turing predicted.

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