ABSTRACT
Turing made strong statements about the future of machines in society. This chapter asks how they can be interpreted to advance our understanding of Turing's philosophy. His irony has largely been caricatured or minimized, and he is often portrayed as an irresponsible scientist, or associated with childlike manners and polite humor. While these representations of Turing have been widely disseminated, another image suggested by one of his contemporaries, that of a nonconformist, utopian, and radically progressive thinker reminiscent of the English Romantic poet Percy B. Shelley, has remained largely underexplored. Following this image, this chapter reconstructs the argument underlying what Turing called (but denied being guilty of) his ‘Promethean irreverence’ (1947-1951) as a utopian satire directed against chauvinists of all kinds, especially intellectuals who might sacrifice independent thought to maintain their power. These, Turing hoped, would eventually be rivaled and surpassed by intelligent machines and transformed into ordinary people, as work once considered intellectual would be transformed into non-intellectual, so-called ‘mechanical’ work. It is suggested that Turing genuinely believed that the possibilities of the machines he envisioned were not utopian dreams, and yet he conceived them from a utopian frame of mind, aspiring to a different society.
