“Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do.
One could say that a man can ‘inject’ an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed.
Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines?”
— Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950
“Let us return for a moment to Lady Lovelace’s objection, which stated that the machine can only do what we tell it to do.
One could say that a man can ‘inject’ an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence, like a piano string struck by a hammer. Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed.
Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines?”
— Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, 1950