Conflating the Problems of Man & Machines

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The New York Sun

Logical man is sexless and even shy. The creators of the original “Star Trek” made him Spock, blithely unemotional; their imitators created Data, an actual android obsessed with emotion he can never feel. Logical man is eccentric; he is a bachelor. C-3P0 has R2-D2; Sherlock Holmes has Dr. Watson. But though he does not participate in heterosexual life, is robotic man – or his scientist father – gay? So suggests novelist David Leavitt in “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer” (W.W. Norton, 319 pages, $22.95).


Alan Turing did not only invent the computer, the proto-computers he built helped crack the German army’s Enigma code. He would have been a national hero had his wartime work not been top secret. In the event, Turing became, in Mr. Leavitt’s phrase, a “Chatterton of the computer world,” a whiz kid to the press, author of the “electronic brain.”


Turing conceived of a computer – a so-called “Turing Machine” – in order to solve a long-standing problem of mathematics, the “Decidability Problem.” “Decidability” means that the truth or falsity of any statement can be ascertained. In other words, there must be a universal way to evaluate all statements. In 1931, David Hilbert asserted that “there is no such thing as an unsolvable problem,” having already challenged his colleagues to prove that “any formalized mathematical system is complete, consistent, and decidable.”


Legions of mathematicians seem to have immediately set out to disprove these claims. Young Kurt Godel refuted completeness and consistency in the same year, and the young Turing refuted decidability in 1937. Turing envisioned a machine that could actually “read” and evaluate mathematical statements, and then attempt to solve them. If it could not, the problem was undecidable. In other words, the decidability test became a question of crashing a computer. The program that could crash even a perfect computer was a version of the classic liar’s paradox; i.e., the statement, “This is a lie.”


Turing wore a rope for a belt, and jogged multiple miles to meetings. According to legend, he wore a gas mask while he bicycled, in order to filter pollen. When in 1954 the police charged Turing with gross indecency – under the same law as Oscar Wilde was – the reputation that Turing had to lean on was already that of a wizard, a man against nature. In the end, after undergoing state-enforced estrogen injections, Turing committed suicide by eating a cyanide-laced apple.


Mr. Leavitt foregrounds a syllogism Turing composed in his final years



Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines cannot think


In Turing’s life, the implicit message of this book goes, we can read a story of two prejudices: against homosexual man and against artificial mind. Turing’s experience of the former is remarkable only for his lack of caution: He was always forthright about his sexuality, a characteristic Mr. Leavitt attributes to the literal-mindedness that inspired all his breakthroughs. Turing’s (admittedly less intense persecution) as a kind of computer-age Prometheus, however, was new.


The attack came from Sir Geoffrey Jefferson, a neurosurgeon and a leading advocate of frontal lobotomies. “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain,” Jefferson said in 1949, setting the bar fairly high. Turing’s defense of computers displayed greater brinksmanship, though: “I do not think you can even draw the line about sonnets, though the comparison is perhaps a little bit unfair because a sonnet written by a machine will be better appreciated by another machine!”


Yet Turing’s anxieties about himself began to bleed into his defense of artificial intelligence. He posited an “imitation test,” in which, in conversation-by-teleprinter, a computer could be programmed to convince an interviewer that the computer was as feminine as a real woman could. He embarassed the doubters’ “Argument from Various Disabilities” with a facetious list of things a computer can never do: “fall in love, enjoy strawberries and cream; make some one fall in love with it.” Turing implied that many humans could not do these things, either.


Mr. Leavitt makes innuendo of “strawberries and cream”; in general, he overemphasizes the connection between Turing’s life and work. He terms Sir Jefferson’s ideas about the soul and humanness “masculine,” while eliding the strangeness of computers into the ill-fitting concepts of foreignness, the cosmopolitan, the European. In dramatizing this unconvincing dichotomy, Mr. Leavitt follows the self-dramatizing lead of Turing’s quoted syllogism, but he ignores the lesson of history.


Turing gave society too much credit. He saw a subtle conspiracy between the enemies of artificial intelligence and the enemies of homosexuality. But it was Turing, not his enemies, that conflated the problems of machines and man. That was his genius.


The New York Sun

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