The Man Who Knew Too Much Quotes

“Nor should it be assumed that machines are not capable of deception. On the contrary, the criticism “that a machine cannot have much diversity of behaviour is just a way of saying that it cannot have much storage capacity.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Having got rid of Jefferson—at least in name—Turing next addresses a whole class of objections that he calls “Arguments from Various Disabilities,” and which he defines as taking the form “I grant you that you can make machines do all the things you have mentioned but you will never be able to make one to do X.” He then offers a rather tongue-in-cheek “selection”:

Be kind, resourceful, beautiful, friendly; have initiative, have a sense of humour, tell right from wrong, make mistakes; fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream; make some one fall in love with it, learn from experience; use words properly, be the subject of its own thought; have as much diversity of behaviour as a man, do something really new.

As Turing notes, “no support is usually offered for these statements,” most of which are

founded on the principle of scientific induction. . . . The works and customs of mankind do not seem to be very suitable material to which to apply scientific induction. A very large part of space-time must be investigated, if reliable results are to be obtained. Otherwise we may (as most English children do) decide that everybody speaks English, and that it is silly to learn French.

Turing’s repudiation of scientific induction, however, is more than just a dig at the insularity and closed-mindedness of England. His purpose is actually much larger: to call attention to the infinite regress into which we are likely to fall if we attempt to use disabilities (such as, say, the inability, on the part of a man, to feel attraction to a woman) as determining factors in defining intelligence. Nor is the question of homosexuality far from Turing’s mind, as the refinement that he offers in the next paragraph attests:

There are, however, special remarks to be made about many of the disabilities that have been mentioned. The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous. Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic. What is important about this disability is that it contributes to some of the other disabilities, e.g. to the difficulty of the same kind of friendliness occurring between man and machine as between white man and white man, or between black man and black man.

To the brew of gender and sexuality, then, race is added, as “strawberries and cream” (earlier bookended between the ability to fall in love and the ability to make someone fall in love) becomes a code word for tastes that Turing prefers not to name.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Can a machine, educated through a system of reward and punishment, be said to be able to think? Are children, when they cry or laugh, revealing some spark of soul that distinguishes them from machines, or simply following “rules of behavior” with which we as spectators empathize because we are familiar with them? Or to put it another way, does asking whether computers think require us to ask, as well, whether humans compute?”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Educability, then, is the principal ingredient of intelligence—which means that in order to be called intelligent, machines must show that they are capable of learning. The fourth objection—“that intelligence in machinery is merely a reflection of that of its creator”—can thus be countered by recognizing its equivalence to “the view that the credit for the discoveries of a pupil should be given to his teacher. In such a case the teacher would be pleased with the success of his methods of education, but would not claim the results themselves unless he had actually communicated them to his pupil.” The student, on the other hand, can be said to be showing intelligence only once he has leaped beyond mere imitation of the teacher and done something that is at once surprising and original, as the infant Gauss did. But what kind of machine would be able to learn in this sense?
[...]
Indeed, at this point in the report, one begins to get the sense that Turing’s ambition is as much to knock mankind off its pedestal as to argue for the intelligence of machines. What seems to irk him, here and elsewhere, is the automatic tendency of the intellectual to grant to the human mind, merely by virtue of its humanness, a kind of supremacy.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Turing’s strategy of opening with a summary of the claims of the naysayers foreshadows the gay rights manifestos of the 1950s and 1960s, which often used a rebuttal of traditional arguments against homosexuality as a frame for its defense. He acknowledges from the outset the futility of trying to talk a zealot out of his zealotry, noting that the first two objections, “being purely emotional, do not really need to be refuted. If one feels it necessary to refute them there is little to be said that could hope to prevail”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“I would say that fair play must be given to the machine. Instead of it sometimes giving no answer we could arrange that it gives occasional wrong answers. But the human mathematician would likewise make blunders when trying out new techniques. It is easy for us to regard these blunders as not counting and give him another chance, but the machine would probably be allowed no mercy. In other words then, if a machine is expected to be infallible, it cannot also be intelligent.

If Turing did not yet understand what it meant to be shown “no mercy,” he would, alas, learn that lesson all too soon. For the present, he was content to make a “plea” that his machines be treated with greater tolerance than he, as a homosexual man, was destined to experience:

To continue my plea for “fair play for the machines” when testing their I.Q. A human mathematician has always undergone an extensive training. This training may be regarded as not unlike putting instruction tables into a machine. One must therefore not expect a machine to do a very great deal of building up of instruction tables on its own. No man adds very much to the body of knowledge, why should we expect more of a machine? Putting the same point differently, the machine must be allowed to have contact with human beings in order that it may adapt itself to their standards.

It all came down to loneliness.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“It seems not improbable that when Turing let slip the fact of his homosexuality “accidentally,” especially to a young man like Bayley, he was hoping against hope that the admission might provoke an expression of reciprocal desire. That rarely happened. Later he told Robin Gandy, “Sometimes you’re sitting talking to someone and you know that in three quarters of an hour you will either be having a marvellous night or you will be kicked out of the room.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Turing’s years at Bletchley constitute the best-documented period in his life, yet in the end his work as a code breaker amounted to a very long diversion from his dream of building a universal machine. For the bombes were about as far from universal as you could get. Their very design guaranteed their obsolescence, since it depended on the quirks and particularities of another, much smaller machine, the Enigma, of which the bombe was the huge, distorted shadow.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“The astonishing saga of the code breakers is really an example of the power of mathematics. Hardy’s “clean and gentle” science, as it turned out, was stronger than the entire German war machine, which, for all its posturing, ended up being trumped by a group of geeky mathematicians and engineers working out their ideas on paper and fitting electrical switches inside ugly-looking machines.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“If a man says ‘I am lying’ we say that it follows that he is not lying, from which it follows that he is lying and so on. Well, so what? You can go on like that until you were black in the face. Why not? It doesn’t matter.” For Turing, it did matter—not in some abstract or ideal sense but because he believed that hidden contradictions could result in things “going wrong.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Decidability is impossible. We are back in the land of paradox, with Epimenides declaring that he is a liar and Bertrand Russell upsetting Frege's applecart”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“Viewed in the light of its imminent decimation, not to mention the decimation of Europe, Hilbert’s program comes across as highly idealistic, even Platonic. At its heart, after all, is the assumption that even undiscovered proofs already exist “somewhere out there”; doubt is taken away, and the mathematician reassured that, with enough time and hard work, he or she can lasso any beast that lurks in the metaphysical wilderness. The program was the perfect expression of Hilbert’s determination to endow younger mathematicians with the will to discover, since it sought to remove from the mathematical endeavor any cause for despair or even uncertainty. Instead, it promised a way out of any maze. “Wir müssen wissen, Wir werden wissen”: though the unicorn itself might not exist, somewhere in the world there had to be evidence that unicorns either were or were not and, if they were, that their existence could be shown by some definite method. Still, Hilbert’s very language suggests at least a trace of anxiety. After all, in the Judeo-Christian universe, Edens are by nature temporary. What God gives, God can also take away. Through his reference to “paradise,” Hilbert seems to be bowing, albeit subconsciously, to the knowledge that though paradise may be infinite, our stay there is decidedly finite. For a serpent lurks in the trees—the paradox.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

“When I asked a Portuguese mathematician of my acquaintance whether he had any insight to offer me on the subject, he replied, “The foundations of mathematics are full of holes and I never felt comfortable dealing with such things.”
Full of holes. Earlier generations of mathematicians assumed that the stability of the landscape on which mathematical structures were built was guaranteed by God or nature. They strode in like pioneers or surveyors, their task to map the fundamentals and in so doing secure the territory that future generations would colonize. But then the holes—of which the liar’s paradox is merely one—started popping up, and the mathematicians started falling in. Never mind! Each hole could be plugged. But soon enough another would open, and another, and another . . .
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) spoke for any number of idealistic mathematicians when he wrote in 1907,

The discovery that all mathematics follows inevitably from a small collection of fundamental laws, is one which immeasurably enhances the intellectual beauty of the whole: to those who have been oppressed by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of most existing chains of deduction, this discovery comes with all the overwhelming force of a revelation: like a palace emerging from the autumn mist as the traveller ascends an Italian hill-side, the stately storeys of the mathematical edifice appear in their due order and proportion, with a new perfection in every part.

I remember that when I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in college, I was particularly fascinated by the character of Mr. Casaubon, whose lifework was a Key to All Mythologies that he could never finish. If Mr. Casaubon’s Key was doomed to incompletion, my astute professor observed, it was at least in part because “totalizing projects,” by their very nature, ramify endlessly; they cannot hope to harness the multitude of tiny details demanded by words like “all,” just as they cannot hope to articulate every generalization to which their premises (in this case, the idea that all mythologies have a single key) give rise. Perhaps without realizing it, my professor was making a mathematical statement—she was asserting the existence of both the infinite and the infinitesimal—and her objections to Mr. Casaubon’s Key hold as well for any number of attempts on the part of mathematicians to establish a Key to All Mathematics.”
― David Leavitt, The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer